Prometheus 6

Uppity-Negro mentioned the State of the Black Union event was to be televised on CSPAN. And a bunch of Black Republicans are holding a press conference under the mantle of the Heritage Foundation, which CSPAN will also present.

Jesse Lee Paterson and the Innis clan...speaking so well together...

I'll record it and watch it tomorrow. Even the Conservative part.

via Cincinnati Black Blog

Legacy of funk
Bootsy Collins is dedicated to enlightening new generation of musicians

By C.E. Hanifin
Enquirer staff writer

Funk pioneer Bootsy Collins says his two mentors, James Brown and George Clinton, didn't just give him career advice. Each of the legendary recording artists also taught him about life.

Now Collins, 53, wants to pass on that knowledge to a new generation of musicians. The Cincinnati native is recognized worldwide for his innovative style of bass playing and his flamboyant fashion sense. Here in his hometown, he's also known for serving as a mentor to young artists.

Collins' dedication to nurturing fresh talent will be acknowledged at the seventh annual Rhythm, Blues and Jazz Masters Summit. The event, Sunday at the 20th Century in Oakley, pays tribute with awards and performances to veteran and up-and-coming area artists in the R&B, jazz, funk, blues and hip-hop genres.

Keith Little, founder of Cincinnati's United Local Artists Network Inc., will present Collins with the organization's inaugural humanitarian award.

"He's always tried to reach back and help people," Little says.

I'm gonna enjoy writing this one.

There's Washington Post article on the impact of HIV infection on the Black community. Blacks hardest hit, etc.

U.S. Survey Indicates Blacks Hardest Hit by HIV Infection
In 2001, Rate for Those Ages 18 to 59 Is 13 Times That of Whites

This sort of article always disturbs me.

For some reason though, I decided to examine this article the same way I do articles on politics and economics.

They tested a proper-sized sample, I think.

In the 2001 survey, out of about 5,500 people examined, 32 were HIV-positive. Of that group, 23 were African American. The overall prevalence of HIV was 0.43 percent, up slightly from 0.33 percent a decade earlier.

On the one hand, that's a disturbingly high rate for a deadly illness, regardless of the selection criteria used to decide who to ask. On the other hand, 32 infections out of 5,500 people means it's not too late for you to be safe.

Also, "18 to 59" is a pretty broad swath. In this age of focus group marketing I can't think of a demographic defined that broadly. There's a a finer tuned result in the middle of the article.

The prevalence of HIV infection in blacks ages 18 to 59 in 1991 was 1.1 percent, about five times higher than what was found in whites. In 2001, it was 2.14 percent, and the gap had increased to 13 times that seen in whites. The hardest-hit group was black men ages 40 to 49, 3.6 percent of whom were infected with HIV when contacted through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Although the later survey showed a marked increase in HIV prevalence in blacks overall, it found no change over 10 years in the 18-to-39 age group. That finding is at odds with numerous other studies showing the AIDS epidemic growing with unusual speed in young black homosexuals (many of whom do not consider themselves to be gay), and in women who are their sex partners or the sex partners of intravenous drug users.

This is interesting.

The whole "on the downlow" thing has been apocryphal from the beginning.

At this point I'm interested enough to look up the original report (okay, the abstract...I'm good, but there's going to be specialized terminology that I can't follow). This is where it gets really interesting, as indicated by the added emphases:

Results:  The age adjusted prevalence of HIV infection in NHANES III was 0.33% (95% CI, 0.22 to 0.52) as compared with a prevalence of 0.43% (95% CI 0.25 to 0.72) in 1999 to 2002. Prevalence was significantly higher among non-Hispanic blacks in the current survey going from 1.10% (95% CI 0.68 to 1.79) to 2.14% (95% CI 1.46 to 3.11). An analysis of risk factors in the current survey demonstrated that only intravenous drug use and herpes simplex-2 antibody were significant risks for infection among non-Hispanic blacks. CD4+ T lymphocyte testing of the HIV positives and age matched controls, showed that 32% of infected individuals had CD4+ cell counts 3, but only 20% of these individuals reported ART use in the last 30 days; 19 infected individuals called for their test results, with 8 reporting that they were not previously aware of their HIV result. Of the 11 individuals who knew of their HIV status, 10 reported current HIV medication.

Conclusions:  HIV seroprevalence in the household population did not significantly change in the 10 years between the 2 surveys, but did significantly increase in the non-Hispanic black population. In the total population, 35% of HIV-infected individuals reported taking ART drugs compared with 18% in the non-Hispanic black population. Since 91% of those who knew their HIV status were being treated, awareness of HIV status continues to be an important component of HIV/AIDS prevention. Data from this representative sample of the U.S. household population demonstrates that racial and ethnic disparities in HIV infection are increasing on national level but since most individuals who knew about their infection were receiving treatment, an increased awareness and availability of HIV testing should help reduce these racial and ethnic disparities.  

The points:

1. An analysis of risk factors in the current survey demonstrated that only intravenous drug use and herpes simplex-2 antibody were significant risks for infection among non-Hispanic blacks.
   That ought to put a knife in the heart of the "downlow" saga. And it's totally in keeping with the greatest increase being in the 40 to 49 year old demographic.
   
   
2. 19 infected individuals called for their test results, with 8 reporting that they were not previously aware of their HIV result
   GET YOUR SHIT TESTED.
   
   
3. Since most individuals who knew about their infection were receiving treatment, an increased awareness and availability of HIV testing should help reduce these racial and ethnic disparities.
   If you're young and not an IV drug user, you know what to do to stay healthy.
   

Yeah, we got an epidemic, but it can be mastered.

Quote of note:

The FDA screens panelists' consulting arrangements and stock holdings before deciding if they can participate in a committee meeting. Panelists who considered the pain drugs were reviewed "according to the same strict ethics guidelines FDA applies to all its advisory committees," said Sheila Dearybury Walcoff, FDA associate commissioner for external relations.

The analysis sparked more congressional concerns over the FDA and its policing of drug safety

Ten on Drug Panel Had Industry Ties, Group Says
Fri Feb 25, 2005 07:06 PM ET

By Lisa Richwine and Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ten of the 32 U.S. advisers who supported future sales of pain relievers Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drug makers, according to a consumer group analysis of medical journals and other records.

Last week, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel said Merck & Co Inc.'s withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx was safe enough to rejoin Pfizer's Celebrex and Bextra on the U.S. market after concluding all three medicines posed some heart risk.

Ten panelists were paid consultants for Pfizer or Merck, according to the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

If those 10 panelists had not voted, the committee would have rejected future sales of Bextra and Vioxx. The Celebrex vote would not have changed because all but one member supported keeping that drug on the market.

"By failing to at least disclose those conflicts before the meeting, the (FDA) has undermined the credibility of the committee's advice," said Merrill Goozner, director of CSPI's integrity in science program.

Talon News Web Site Closes Amid Heavy Criticism
Fri Feb 25, 2005 08:42 PM ET

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas-based Web site whose conservative connections touched off a White House media controversy has shut down "to reevaluate operations," according to a message posted on the site.

A spokeswoman for Talon News said the site closed because its founder, Bobby Eberle of Pearland, Texas, "can only take so much beating" over the page's political slant, the Houston Chronicle reported on Friday.

Talon, which could not immediately be reached for comment, came under fire after its White House reporter, who identified himself as Jeff Gannon, asked a politically loaded question at a White House press conference and was accused by critics of being used by the Bush administration to spread conservative propaganda.

Since then, Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, has been linked to gay porn Web sites and prostitution, and photos of him naked have circulated on the Web.

Quote of note:

This, of course, was all supposed to end when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2003 issued rules that required more clarity in corporate earnings results. The new rules were a response to reporting abuses in the 1990s, especially among technology and telecommunications companies that ignored normal business costs as a way of padding their bottom lines.

Lifting the Lid: U.S. Companies Hide Bad News Deep in Releases
Sat Feb 26, 2005 07:30 AM ET

By Michael Flaherty

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Burying bad news is back with a vengeance.

Investors may have thought the days when companies hid massive net losses, focused on some kind of weird adjusted measure of earnings and talked mumbo jumbo about their prospects died out with the dot-com bust. But a glance through some of the reports coming through in the past week shows that just isn't the case.

Take Clear Channel Communications Inc., for example. You won't find any mention of its quarterly net loss of $4.67 billion until page 9 of the earnings statement. The company's quarterly results, reported on Friday, were hit with a $4.9 billion write-down -- and that wasn't deemed important enough to mention until page 7.

"The charge doesn't upset me, it's the fact that it was so hard to find," said analyst Peter Mirsky of Oppenheimer & Co. "It's disturbing that the company wouldn't be a bit more forward about it."

Associated Press joins Reuters in providing RSS feeds.

South Knox Bubba and his commenters give us the real nigger-show -- the genuine nigger-show, the extravagant nigger-show.

Shannon at Egotistical Whining runs a list of people of color blogs off the top of her head. Seven of them are new to me but I pretty much agree with her assessments of the other twelve.

Date: Feb. 9, 2005
Contacts: Vanee Vines, Senior Media Relations Officer
Chris Dobbins, Media Relations Assistant
Office of News and Public Information
202-334-2138; e-mail

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

U.S. National Academies Select Partners For Initiative to Develop African Science Academies

WASHINGTON   The U.S. National Academies have selected the science academies of Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa as initial focal points for a program to strengthen African scientists' ability to inform government policy-making and public discourse with independent, evidence-based advice. The initiative, supported by a $20 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be carried out in Africa over the next decade, focusing on efforts to improve human health.

"Ultimately, the goal is to enhance life for all Africans by making it possible for Africa's scientific community to more effectively tap its potential, both in meeting national needs and in creating a strong science base for public policy," said Bruce Alberts, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa's academies were chosen based on their vitality and potential for success, the willingness of each country's government to draw on scientific expertise in decision-making, and the pool of available scientific talent in each nation.

The initiative will help the three academies   which have limited experience in providing policy guidance   engage broader communities of African scientists, medical and health care professionals, and engineers in policy issues. The U.S. National Academies will guide efforts early on, in part by carrying out a series of joint activities, but the aim is to create the capacity in each nation for efforts to thrive under the leadership and support of the African academies themselves. Thus, some of the preliminary activities will center on helping the three academies develop the skills to plan and conduct scientific studies, organize major conferences, raise and manage funds, create and implement administrative procedures, and build lasting relationships with government officials and other stakeholders in their countries.

The U.S. National Academies have also awarded strategic planning grants to the science academies of Cameroon, Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya. And the initiative will support various meetings and symposia to promote collaboration and joint learning among sub-Saharan Africa's science academies. Furthermore, Canada's International Development Research Centre will work with the U.S. National Academies to bolster the initiative and will provide financial assistance for the participation of a fourth initial partner in Africa.

The U.S. National Academies comprise the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.

[ This news release is available at http://national-academies.org ]

So I follow this link I got by email to Toledo Hip Hop.org. They're putting together a CD and have some tracks online. The list that I got the link from is such that I'm expecting hip hop rather than rap but beyond that I have no idea.

When the page loads I scan it as I normally do. Lotta tracks.

I get to the links section at the end of the page and I see

Move The Crowd - Mercury Rising & Imani Lateef's blog

...which struck me because I know Michael at Trader Mike has had a blog named Move The Crowd for as long as I've had Prometheus 6.

And when I check it out, I find Brotha's Gonna Work It Out at the top of the page. And suddenly I'm confronted with the need to do something intelligent to keep track of all the Black folks' sites I run into because I'm not prepared to let wither Move the Crowd slip.

Brotha's Gonna Work It Out
Mercury Rising

One of the most recent issues of Ebony (Even though I've always felt that our people were better off with a publication like Ebony than without, I have to admit that I didn't really feel like I had much in common with the perspectives shown in those pages. But then I started reading For Brothers Only; the one page editorial usually written by Kevin Chappell that deals with young Black Men on our own terms. I began to appreciate and expect that monthly Ebony magazine arriving in my mailbox. ) finds For Brothers Only shedding some light on a new phenomenon responsible, compassionate and motivated young Black men.

We all know that brothas have been working it out any way we could for a long time.

But for years the media (even our own), women (even our own) and society as a whole seemed to focus plainly on those of us who got caught up in the streets. Yes, we know that some of us move weight. Yes, we know that some of us are Crips, and some of us are Bloods. Yes, we know that we have packed ourselves in prisons almost as regularly as we have packed ourselves in universities. Guns, baby momma drama, bad credit, over-active libidos and an endless stack of excuses for our shortcomings   I know.

In some instances we've found our entire worth reduced to what we own in the eyes of our better halves and societal norms.
If a struggling brotha doesn t have much, everyone calls him a scrub.
If a ballin'-type brotha stays iced up, he gets props for having ends regardless of the means.
But young black men have more on our minds than money, crime and fast living.

Kevin Chappell's article mirrored conversations I ve had with my peeps, who are mostly young black men, about  young black men. Everything he says in that article is true. More of us are interested in home ownership more now than ever before.

More of us are interested in entrepreneurship and careers more now than ever before. And of course, more of us are interested in committed monogamous relationships with strong and intelligent women more now than ever before (more on that another time). After reading this particular For Brothers Only, I got in the car to go somewhere and John Legend's "Ordinary People" was on and that song just drove the point even further.

I know ya'll know the song, and I know ya'll love the song   but really, really listen to dude. Doesn't he sound like someone you know? Haven't you heard more and more young black men expressing their feelings and emotions lately?

Haven't you seen a little more wisdom, compassion and sensitivity lately?

And NO, I don't mean "on the down low" type of sensitivity.

See, when talk shows started putting that on blast àit didn t even matter whether or not it was really happening because everyone was talking about it.

At the end of the day when Black women would claim that finding a good black man is already hard enough, I'm sure it didn't help when the world tried to convince them that more and more of us are supposedly going gay. Yo, I m just saying 
Let it be known that even if we caught a few bumps and bruises on our way out the streets, we are right here. Let it be known that not all of us even come from the streets but sure enough we are right here.
Very heterosexual, very family-oriented and ready, willing and able to take our place in this world ænbsp; that's who we know we are, and that's who we want to be known as.

But as much good as Kevin and his For Brothers Only write up does for our cause, the opposition remains determined to keep things twisted.

I'm sure you've seen those headlines "10 Ways To Tell If Your Man Is Cheating", " Top 10 Reasons He Might Be Cheating" or some mess. You know exactly what I'm talking about, I'm sure. Now, I'm not gonna gas ya'll up like every black man you see walking around town is reformed from his bad habits ænbsp; but when it comes to for the 22-32 age group, I know more men who are faithful than I do men who are cheaters. If I grouped all of my boys from high school until now into groups of 10, I would say that probably 2 out of every 10 was the type to cheat or bounce around from girl to girl.

But that means that at least 8 or so were about commitment.

The media has things so crazy, some researchers are actually developing theories explaining why it actually may be impossible for men not to cheat. Theories or at the very least some type of physiological proof that men are simply prone to cheat

If you ask me, that undermines everything that we stand for.

With the next Million Man March right around the corner, I m sure it will be evident how many young black men have embraced the honor of being the corner stone of our families. Maybe some of our biological fathers didn t bother, but being a devoted husband and father is very important to every young black man I know.

Being successful is very important to every young black man I know.

Whether Christian, Muslim, Rasta, Five Percenter, Jehova's Witness or otherwise; being spiritually centered is very important to every young black man I know.

So whether we get our p's or not, we will be here doing our thing until the thing gets done.
Hopefully the world will take notice.

This is something I've been annoyed at for one hell of a long time. I first realized what was going on over a decade ago while reading a "celebrate Kwanzaa" insert in the local newspaper. It featured articles on the history of Kwanzaa and recipes. The one that struck me was the "Brand name Authentic Kwanzaa Punch™," a trademarked entity that must be made with Dole® Pineapple Juice and Chiquita® Bananas.

Nowadays they skip the lessons and just print "Happy Kwanzaa" under a brown menorah.

But this isn't a complaint. This is a lesson.

Because this is how it's done. Rhetorically tie what you intend to what they want...a sutra I know of calls this "dip[ping] the dust of desire in a drop of the teaching." But keep your purpose in the shadow of your words. Let the message you send obstruct the view of your actions, let it be your defense against the impact of your deeds. Act as though your stated intent is more important than the events that follow.

I'm not saying do it this way, because I don't. But know this is the way it's done.

Black History and Ads Don't Mix, Activists Say
By Avis Thomas-Lester

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page A01

The green and yellow flier from the Kmart in Aspen Hill proclaimed, "Celebrate Black History" and then advertised "3 for $1 Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix" and "3 for $10 Tone 6-Bar Soap."

The makers of Metamucil and Pepto-Bismol ran a full-page ad in this month's Ebony magazine declaring, "Black History Month is a legacy of pride and achievement leading to a healthier tomorrow." The ad continues, "It's the same ideals you turn to when it comes to your GI Health -- a history of digestive solutions."

The advertisements are among dozens that tout laxatives, cars, even yoga classes under the guise of paying homage to African American history. Educators and some civil rights activists say they are bothered by what they consider exploitation of a season meant to honor the contributions of black Americans. But marketing experts say the trend is not surprising in a nation that once considered draping advertising banners across the base of the Statue of Liberty.

"Eventually any piece of history or American culture gets trivialized by advertisers," said Barbara Lippert, the advertising critic for Adweek magazine. "They just use any opportunity as a platform to sell something...Everything becomes about buying and selling."

Sticking it hard to foreign corporations that "abet the spread of weaponry through their subsidiaries" would indeed have a significant impact on the arms race. But the sanction laws these gentlemen complain about will not be touched. Yes they shield foreign corporations, but they shield our domestic engines of prosperity as well.

I mean, if we're holding corporations responsible for the actions of their subsidiaries we could indict Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Bechtel and ConocoPhillips based on the transactions mentioned in this article alone. And there is no way to exclude domestic companies from any change in the laws that wouldn't cast a dark shadow on American diplomatic efforts until human habitation of the planet comes to an end.

Anyway...

A Shell Game in the Arms Race
By MATTHEW GODSEY and GARY MILHOLLIN

Washington

PRESIDENT BUSH has enjoyed a surprisingly jovial reception in Europe this week, but there has been a serious point of contention: the desire of European countries to lift the 15-year ban on arms sales to China. Given concerns that the Chinese are willing to sell military, and perhaps even nuclear, technology to the highest bidder, Mr. Bush's stance seems admirable. Unfortunately, his reasonable skepticism about China's intentions hasn't translated into a solid commitment.

For example, earlier this month Under Secretary of State John Bolton scolded China for allowing its companies to spread weapons technology, saying the embargo was just as important "today as it was in 1989." Yet such talk is undermined by the State Department's own failure to check Chinese companies' reckless sales, and by weaknesses in American trade laws. In the end, China knows it has little to fear from Washington.

Case in point: Sinopec, China's state-owned oil and gas giant, has subsidiaries that the State Department has hit with sanctions four times since 1997 for selling to Iran materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. However, because these subsidiaries do little or no business with the United States, the punishments - curbs on trade with America - were purely symbolic.

Sinopec itself has extensive ties with American companies, dealings Washington could block. Yet we refuse to punish it for anything its offshoots do. The reason is simple: American sanctions laws were written so that the government can hold a parent company responsible only if it "knowingly" assists a sale by its subsidiary, a burden of proof our intelligence agencies can rarely meet. Why? Because our government is largely unwilling to hurt the financial interests of American firms that do business with companies like Sinopec.

This laxity on our part leaves Sinopec free to sell whatever it likes to Tehran. In 1997, the same year the State Department first cited subsidiaries of Sinopec for "knowingly and materially contributing to Iran's chemical weapon program," Iran promised to increase oil exports to China by 40 percent. The following year, Iran chose the Chinese company over a host of European rivals to renovate oil refineries in Tehran and Tabriz, and to construct an oil terminal on the Caspian Sea. In 2001, when the State Department again censured a subsidiary for continuing sales to Iran of products useful for poison gas production, Sinopec won the right to explore Iran's Zavareh-Kashan oilfield.

Then, last October, Sinopec pulled off its biggest coup: a $70 billion deal in which the Chinese company will buy hundreds of millions of tons of liquefied natural gas and will help Iran develop its Yadavaran oil field.

The fact is, the United States could lower the boom on Sinopec by cutting its ties to the American economy. In 2000, Sinopec raised some $3.5 billion by selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, with Exxon-Mobil buying a large stake. Halliburton has since provided Sinopec a design for a new chemical plant; Bechtel has helped it build a petrochemical complex in China; and ConocoPhillips has aided it in oil and gas exploration.

And, believe it or not, in 2002 Sinopec received a $429,000 grant from the United States Trade and Development Agency. The purpose was to help an import-export subsidiary to develop an electronic procurement system. No matter that another Sinopec subsidiary, the awkwardly named Jiangsu Yongli Chemical Engineering and Technology Import/Export Corporation, was under sanctions for sales to Iran, or that Sinopec ranked among the 100 richest firms in the world according to Fortune magazine. Uncle Sam still wanted to help it market its products.

Sinopec is hardly the only beneficiary of American kindliness. Our weak laws have spared Sinosteel, China Aviation Industry Corporation I and II, and China North Industries Group Corporation, even though subsidiaries of these state-owned conglomerates have been sanctioned for selling missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. In large part, we can lay the blame for this charade on a compliant government and on political pressure from American companies, whose lobbyists work to ensure that federal sanctions laws are written to protect their corporate interests. This is a travesty, because cutting off access to our economy is the most powerful leverage we have, and our failure to use it shows we aren't serious about punishing rogue states and their corporations.

Our laws need to be rewritten so that Sinopec and other companies that abet the spread of weaponry through their subsidiaries are kicked out of American capital markets, forbidden to deal with our companies and denied access to American goods and technology. Only then will they have an incentive to change their ways, and only then can our government honestly claim that it is trying to shut down the global arms bazaar.

Matthew Godsey and Gary Milhollin are, respectively, a research associate and the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, which produces iranwatch.org.

Quote of note:

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about "Christmas under siege" - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas."

Kansas on My Mind
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Call it "What's the Matter With Kansas - The Cartoon Version."

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

Their first foray - an ad accusing the seniors' organization of being against the troops and for gay marriage - was notably inept. But they'll be back, and it's important to understand what they're up to.

The answer lies in "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Thomas Frank's meditation on how right-wingers, whose economic policies harm working Americans, nonetheless get so many of those working Americans to vote for them.

...The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends."

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. "Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization." But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

Quote of note:

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has announced plans to run for governor in 2006, argued that public officials "should not be allowed to avoid sanctions for misconduct simply by leaving state service."

Case of Former SUNY Official Points to Ethics Law Loophole
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

When Karen R. Hitchcock resigned last year as president of the State University of New York at Albany, she said she was leaving earlier than expected to deal with family concerns.

But at the time, Dr. Hitchcock faced a state ethics inquiry into accusations that she offered to steer a campus construction contract to a developer, who in exchange would pay to endow a university professorship that she could fill once she left her job as college president, according to state officials familiar with the ethics review.

Facing a complaint filed with the state Ethics Commission, Dr. Hitchcock expedited her departure from the state payroll, even surrendering accrued vacation time, the officials said. That action stopped investigators from looking into the complaint because of a loophole in state law that effectively grants most employees immunity when they leave the state payroll - no matter what their actions while on the job.

A lawyer representing Dr. Hitchcock, Michael Whiteman of Albany, acknowledged that he was aware of an ethics complaint involving Dr. Hitchcock but denied all the accusations against her. Now Dr. Hitchcock has a new job, as principal of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.

But the timing of her departure from her Albany post in 2004, along with dozens of other cases in the last decade in which state employees suspected of wrongdoing left their jobs, has prompted calls to close the loophole by having the ethics law cover former state employees, as Gov. George E. Pataki first proposed in 1996.

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has announced plans to run for governor in 2006, argued that public officials "should not be allowed to avoid sanctions for misconduct simply by leaving state service."

Quote of note:

"The reporters at issue relied upon the promise of confidentiality to gather information concerning issues of paramount national importance," Judge Sweet wrote, referring to Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, both of The Times. "The government has failed to demonstrate that the balance of competing interests weighs in its favor."

Good. Because you can't just flatly state reporters are immune to being investigated but you damn sure can't just turn them over reflexively.

Judge Blocks Inspection of Times Reporters' Phone Records
By ADAM LIPTAK

A federal prosecutor may not inspect the phone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to learn their confidential sources, a federal judge in New York ruled yesterday.

The decision interpreted a 1972 ruling of the United States Supreme Court as providing broad First Amendment protections to reporters facing grand jury subpoenas.

That interpretation is at odds with a decision last week by a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, which held that the 1972 ruling, in Branzburg v. Hayes, gave reporters almost no protection. In the latest decision, Judge Robert W. Sweet of the Federal District Court in Manhattan relied on decisions of the federal appeals court in New York.

The differing interpretations highlighted by yesterday's decision may make the Supreme Court more likely to review one of the cases. The justices often agree to hear appeals to resolve so-called circuit splits.

Judge Sweet wrote that the appeals court in New York, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, had spoken clearly in similar cases. "The Second Circuit, based on Branzburg, has recognized a qualified First Amendment privilege," Judge Sweet wrote. The privilege, he said, "protects reporters from compelled disclosure of their confidential sources." But the privilege is not absolute, he continued; parties seeking to overcome it must show that the information sought is critical and cannot be obtained elsewhere.

Judge Sweet acknowledged that last week's decision, by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, "flatly rejected" that interpretation of Branzburg.

Judge Sweet's opinion was 120 pages long, and much of it was devoted to describing what he said was the important role of confidential sources in news reporting.

"The reporters at issue relied upon the promise of confidentiality to gather information concerning issues of paramount national importance," Judge Sweet wrote, referring to Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, both of The Times. "The government has failed to demonstrate that the balance of competing interests weighs in its favor."

The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, had argued that he needed the records for a grand jury's investigation of government misconduct in the disclosure to the reporters of impending government actions against two Islamic charities.

Didn't the feds try this? And didn't it fail?

Typically, the request is couched in noble reasoning that is belied by the actual demand. If Kline's purpose is as stated he should be requesting the records only for abortion patients that haven't reached the age of majority in Kansas. You could actually build a case for that I could support.

But he wants adult patients' records. And no one is going to even have records of illegal abortions.

I repeat: no one that performs illegal late term abortions will have hospital records documenting the crime.

Fishing expeditions in our private records and medical histories should not be allowed. That simple.

Kansas Prosecutor Demands Files on Late-Term Abortion Patients
By JODI WILGOREN

TOPEKA, Kan., Feb. 24 - Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two years in the post, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying on Thursday that he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases.

Mr. Kline emphasized statutory rape at a news conference here but also spoke obliquely of other crimes that court documents suggest could include doctors' providing illegal late-term abortions and health professionals' failing to heed a state law that requires the reporting of suspected child sexual abuse.

"When a 10-, 11- or 12-year-old child is pregnant, under Kansas law that child has been raped, and as the state's chief law enforcement official it is my obligation to investigate child rape in order to protect Kansas children," Mr. Kline said. "There are two things that child predators want, access to children and secrecy. As attorney general, I'm bound and determined not to give them either."

He declined to answer questions about his investigation.

PETER FERRARA:
CATO INSTITUTE WANTS TO GET RID OF THE ENTIRE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM.

Peter Ferrara, an outspoken proponent of Social Security privatization blurted out the truth to today's Washington Post, "Cato wants to get rid of the entire Social Security system, and I don't." Ferrara spent a decade as the Mont Pelerin Society-created Cato Institute's lead analyst and proselytizer for Social Security privatization, and another 15 years working with Cato, so he is well-positioned to know what he is saying about Cato. EIR has documented that Cato Institute took over and wrote most of the recommendations of the Dec 2001 final report of President Bush's official "Commission to Strengthen Social Security," which Bush adopted and presented, with minor changes, in his Feb. 2 State of the Union address. Therefore, Ferrara is admitting that Bush wants to get rid of Social Security.

...Today, Ferrara and Cato are having a nasty lover's spat: both would divert half of the 12.4 percentage points in taxes that workers and employer combined would normally pay into Social Security, instead into Wall Street- managed private accounts. But Cato openly calls for sharp cuts in retiree benefits; Ferrara says that openly backing cuts will defeat privatization in Congress (instead one should 'disguise' the cuts).

Seems the "where da wimmin at?" permathread has reared its head once more. And as part of the manifestation, the forces of chaos have arranged for Prof. DeLong to link to me for no apparent reason.

Cool.

Friday noon is the second open thread, folks.

Check this out. Read the excerpts and let me know what you think.

GOP reps targeted on Bush plan
BY J. JIONI PALMER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

February 23, 2005

New York Republicans such as Reps. Peter King (Seaford) and Vito Fossella (Staten Island) find themselves in the crosshairs of local activists bent on forcing them into signing a pledge opposing the Bush administration's plan to partially privatize Social Security.

The push to get so-called Blue State Republicans - GOP lawmakers from states like New York that lean Democratic - to break with the president comes at a time of national debate over how to reshape the retirement benefits program.

"We're asking this of every member of the New York delegation," said Alex Navarro, communication director of the Working Families Party, which is helping coordinate the campaign.

Besides committing signatories to opposing privatizing Social Security in principle, the four-point pledge specifically forbids tinkering with the program in ways that would reduce retirement benefits, raise the retirement age or increase the federal deficit.

Florida official faces criticism over showing of Chris Rock video to NAACP leaders

By BRENDAN FARRINGTON, AP

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (AP) - Six black lawmakers called for the removal of the head of the state's juvenile justice department for showing a video by comedian Chris Rock at a meeting with civil rights activists.

One lawmaker called the black comedian's 4-minute skit - "How To Not Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police" - "absolutely racist." A member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who attended the viewing last July said no one complained.

The skit, which came from Rock's former HBO comedy show, was shown in the office of Juvenile Justice Secretary Anthony Schembri - the former head of New York City's jails who was the model for the 1991-1995 offbeat television show "The Commish."

Rock's tips for young blacks include driving with a white friend, and turning down loud rap music when pulled over. The video also shows scenes where actors dressed as police pretend to beat up blacks who didn't follow Rock's advice - a driver who jumps out of his car during a traffic stop and starts yelling profanities, and a man who jumps a subway turnstile while smoking marijuana and carrying a gun.

"I found this as being totally and absolutely racist, there's no way around it," said Democratic state Sen. Mandy Dawson, who was joined by five other black lawmakers. "It doesn't make sense to me to show this type of video under any circumstances to the NAACP."

Schembri's spokesman, Tom Denham, said the video was part of a discussion on racial profiling. He said Schembri, who is white, previously used it when teaching college courses as a way to open up discussion on profiling.

If you have a problem you want to solve and you insist the solution must contain certain elements, there is a way to do it. Simply set forth your elements and refuse to allow them to change. The world won't end no matter how silly the position you set forth is...and if you have the power to prevent anyone from adjusting or removing what you've set forth then everyone else is simply forced to adjust their position accordingly.

This is the central technique of neocons and cultural reversionists. And it works, sort of. The reality is, the world adjusts to anything you do. But another reality is, you may well not like the adjustment it makes. Iraq stands as the best example of this whole process. To me, the net result of all this in a few years will be a U.S. military presence firmly and permanently based in Iraq with all the resources necessary to defend our national interests...which will need much more defence due to the way we established that presence.

Yin and yang.

This was also the central technique of the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century. Black Americans simply asserted that the rights of citizenship belong to us as well as anyone else. What actually got the mainstream to acquiesce wasn't a recognition of the justice of that claim but embarrassment...the shame Americans felt at seeing how brutally Black folks were treated by Americans, and (most importantly) embarrassment at having that treatment constantly raised in an international context. An amicus curiae brief (pdf, page 9) filed by the feds in the original Brown vs. Board of Ed case explained the federal government's interest this way:

The shamefulness and absurdity of Washington's treatment of Negro Americans is highlighted by the presence of many dark-skinned foreign visitors. Capital custom mot only humiliates colored citizens but is a source of constant embarrassment to these visitors.

Foreign officials are often mistaken for American Negroes and refused food, lodging and entertainment. However, once it is established that they are not Americans, they are accommodated.

It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny tha the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world, of every nationality, race, and color, that a free democracy is the most civbilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. We must set an example for others by showing firm determination to remove existing flaws in our democracy.

The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.

There's considerably more of interest in the brief (in particular, legal issues that suggest it may not have been necessary to address the "separate but equal" doctrine, that the doctrine should be overruled if necessary but sent back to localities to actually decide how to make things equal). But this is the Federal government's uninterpreted explanation of why they supported the Brown side of Brown v. Board of Ed.

Mind you, the NAACP of the day recognized this. Their own amicus brief included a reference to international opinion. And I doubt they really cared much about it, but in the words of Dr. Gleason Golightly, "A people without power must use deception and guile."

In this regard, little has changed. Right now the nation is divided as it hasn't been since Reconstruction. And we know how the rift was closed in those days...Black southerners were dispossessed and left at the mercy of the KKK and state governments (as though you could slide a sheet of paper between the two at the time). Nowadays, being more civilized, I doubt it will come to a war of secession. There will be negotiations and some of the interests of each side will be sacrificed as a compromise.

Now, who really believes the Republican Party, with their "branding problem," won't drop those interests specific to their Black cohort first?

Probably the same dummies that believe the Democratic Party, with their outreach to white males, won't drop those interests specific to their Black cohort first.

This is not a suggestion that it's all futile...after all, some things have indeed changed. They just haven't done so due to concerns for morality or justice. This is a suggestion that you be up on the real motivation for these changes, and take those motivations into account as you make your plans.

Canada Says It Won't Join Missile Shield With the U.S.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

TORONTO, Feb. 23 - The Canadian government has refused to take part in a planned North America missile defense system despite personal lobbying by President Bush here last November, United States diplomatic officials said Wednesday.

The long-awaited decision from Prime Minister Paul Martin was a symbolic setback for the Bush administration when it is trying to heal rifts with allies that emerged from the invasion of Iraq.

It was conveyed privately to senior United States officials this week in Ottawa and at the NATO summit meeting in Brussels, United States diplomats said. Asked about the issue on Wednesday in Parliament, Mr. Martin would not confirm that a decision had been made, but according to newspaper reports here quoting anonymous sources, an official announcement will be made this week.

Quote of note:

...it relies on the generosity of doctors and hospitals to provide specialty services free of charge.

Really.

In America. Profit driven America with its for-profit hospitals.

Don't make me laugh. We are obviously a long way away from any serious reform.

Model in Utah May Be Future for Medicaid

By KIRK JOHNSON and REED ABELSON

SALT LAKE CITY - Anyone looking for clues as to how the Bush administration might overhaul the Medicaid system should come to Utah and read the fine print of Tony Martinez's health insurance plan.

Mr. Martinez, 56, was homeless and without any health coverage a year ago. Now, under an experimental plan of partial insurance devised under Michael O. Leavitt when he was governor of Utah, Mr. Martinez can see a doctor or go to the emergency room for only a small fee.

But he and his wife, Lisa, are not covered at all for the potentially catastrophic costs of extended hospitalization or specialty medical treatment, from dermatology to oncology. For those services, they must rely, as they did when they were homeless, on charity.

And that brings the story back to Mr. Leavitt, who as President Bush's new secretary of health and human services is now leading a drive to change how Medicaid works and often points to Utah as an illuminating example that other states might consider - although it is an innovation that policy experts, doctors and advocates for the poor are deeply ambivalent about.

In Utah, Mr. Leavitt's plan departs from the traditional Medicaid program on two main fronts. First, it spreads out a lower, more basic level of care to more people, and reduces coverage for some traditional beneficiaries by imposing co-payments for services. And second, it relies on the generosity of doctors and hospitals to provide specialty services free of charge.

In doing so, the state has in many ways reframed and reshaped the national debate over Medicaid and health care for the indigent, experts say, broadening the focus from the question of who does and does not have health insurance, to what constitutes basic health coverage.

Many academics and health care analysts say they also worry that substantial state-by-state Medicaid experiments could fracture and fragment a system that while never without its critics, has evolved into an anchor of health coverage for the poor since its introduction in the 1960's. Medicaid could create a landscape of winners and losers determined largely by whether they are lucky enough not to become seriously ill.

There is no tomorrow

Bill Moyers

Published January 30, 2005

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true -- one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right -- the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed -- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 -- just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer -- "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election -- 231 legislators in total and more since the election -- are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that -- it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

  That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.

  That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.

  That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.

  That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.

  That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million -- $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council -- to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer -- pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free -- not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma -- the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

Checking my morning mail, I had the thought that a filter that spell checks email titles could flag an incredible amount of spam.

Report Faults Bush Initiative on Education
By SAM DILLON

Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools.

The report, based on hearings in six cities, praised the law's goal of ending the gap in scholastic achievement between white and minority students. But most of the 77-page report, which the Education Department rebutted yesterday, was devoted to a detailed inventory and discussion of its flaws.

It said the law's accountability system, which punishes schools whose students fail to improve steadily on standardized tests, undermined school improvement efforts already under way in many states and relied on the wrong indicators. The report said that the law's rules for educating disabled students conflicted with another federal law, and that it presented bureaucratic requirements that failed to recognize the tapestry of educational challenges faced by teachers in the nation's 15,000 school districts.

"Under N.C.L.B., the federal government's role has become excessively intrusive in the day-to-day operations of public education," the National Conference of State Legislatures said in the report, which was written by a panel of 16 state legislators and 6 legislative staff members.

Several education experts said the panel had accurately captured the views of thousands of state lawmakers, and local educators. If that is so, the report suggests that the Bush administration could face continuing friction with states and school districts as the Department of Education seeks to carry out the law in coming months.

Iran Says Does Not Want U.S. to Join Nuclear Talks

February 24, 2005

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Thursday it did not want the United States to become more involved in negotiations Tehran is holding with the European Union over its nuclear program.

European leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder, urged President Bush this week to join the EU approach of offering incentives to Iran in return for scrapping some atomic work.

Bush's national security adviser Stephen Hadley, said on Wednesday Bush would consider the use of incentives such as the membership of the World Trade Organization and the sale of civilian aircraft to Iran, when he returns to Washington.

But Iran, which strongly denies U.S. accusations it is secretly building nuclear arms, said it did not want Washington to join the nuclear talks with Britain, France and Germany.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran does not see any reason why the United States should join the negotiations between the three European countries and Iran on its nuclear program," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.

Much of the crap we deal with cyclically, most of the spin (like the Republican claim that they's been looking out for the nigras all along) wouldn't even be attempted if there was a better general knowledge of history. But we limp along, building arguments based on the propaganda that is K-12 history.

Anyway...

A History of Flawed Teaching
By Sam Wineburg
Sam Wineburg, author of "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Temple University Press, 2001), is a professor in Stanford's School of Education.
February 24, 2005

Imagine this: Nearly a third of the students who apply to Stanford's master's in teaching program to become history teachers have never taken a single college course in history. Outrageous? Yes, but it's part of a well-established national pattern. Among high school history teachers across the country, only 18% have majored (or even minored) in the subject they now teach.

I don't doubt the dedication of these people. The application statements I read at Stanford shine with a commitment that renews one's faith in the passion of today's youth. And nearly every one of these young people is willing to forsake a more lucrative career   in law, medicine, business   to pursue teaching.

But how can you teach what you don't know? Would someone who wanted to teach calculus dare to submit a transcript with no math courses? Would a prospective chemistry teacher come to us with a record devoid of science? Yet with history, the theory goes, all you need is a big heart and a thick book.

Let's Try 'No State Left Behind'
February 24, 2005

Why can't California get the same deal as Utah regarding the No Child Left Behind Act? As the new U.S. secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings is showing welcome flexibility —  but troubling inconsistency —  when it comes to enforcing the arcane and sometimes nonsensical regulations covering schools.

Utah wants permission to use its own accountability system rather than the federal one, and its House of Representatives recently passed a bill giving state education rules priority. Spellings has said she's willing to visit Utah and listen, and that's promising talk. Utah does a superior job of tracking achievement, by measuring year-to-year improvement of each student. That's the gold standard for leaving no child behind, not the federal law's convoluted statistical juggling that requires a certain number of students from all sorts of tiny demographic subgroups to meet an imaginary bar called "proficiency."

California gets no such friendly ear when it comes to measuring achievement among the state's school districts. Spellings' office insists that the state add about 300 school districts to the "failing" list because they avoided censure only via a California escape clause: Any district that can improve scores among low-income students by a certain amount is safe, no matter how its other students fared. Individual schools have no such flexibility; this is extended to districts only.

State officials are concerned about putting outstanding school systems in danger of being dismantled —  which can happen under the federal law after a few failing years —  simply because a handful of students in a couple of schools don't meet their testing goals.

Beyond Putin's Soul
February 24, 2005

Hopefully President Bush has improved his soul-reading skills while in office. During his first year as president he famously proclaimed that he'd acquired a sense of Vladimir V. Putin's soul and found him to be trustworthy.

When Bush looks into Putin's eyes today during their meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia, he should try to divine whether Putin is now capable of reversing course and putting Russia back on the path toward greater freedom and becoming a mature democracy. That's Bush's oft-proclaimed goal in countries great and small, but one growing more distant in Russia.

Technically this is a "subscriber only" article. If this link doesn't work got to TomPaine.com, whose link worked for me.

HOW LIBERALISM CAME TO THE U.S.
Structural Flaw
by John B. Judis

In the wake of almost every Democratic defeat since 1972, liberals can be found insisting that, if their candidate had adhered to the party's core economic beliefs and steered clear of social issues, he would have done much better, if not won. If Democrats were to return to "the liberalism this country once heard from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy," Princeton University sociologist Paul Starr declared in The New York Times last month, it would "give the Democratic party back its majority." But this electoral advice--whatever its merits--sidesteps a much more basic and disturbing question: Is it possible any longer to enact the kind of liberal program that Roosevelt and his successors did? In other words, even if a Democrat were elected in 2008 on a liberal platform, would he or she be able to put it into effect? 

If you look at the history of liberalism, what you discover is not reassuring. From 1932 through 1974--even when Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were president--liberals got much of their program enacted, but, since then, they have failed abysmally. In 1977, Jimmy Carter championed bills that matched almost perfectly what Starr includes in his liberal agenda--"progressive taxation, affordable health care ... environmental [and] labor protection"--but Carter failed to get any of them passed even though he had a sizable Democratic majority in Congress; in 1993 and 1994, Bill Clinton couldn't enact his signature health care measure with an almost equally large congressional majority. 

It is convenient to blame these failures on incompetence, but the truth is that structural factors were more important. Liberalism's success from the '30s through the 1960s was based primarily upon certain special economic and political conditions: popular pressure from below, business' acquiescence in reform, and the conviction of the nation's opinion-makers that reform was good for America. Since then, dramatic changes in the international economy have turned business against reform and weakened the other forces supporting reform. Liberalism is by no means defunct, but it has been put on the defensive--most particularly, in this second Bush term. If Democrats want to revive liberalism, and not merely win office for themselves, they will have to address--and, where possible, rectify--the conditions that have undermined it.

If the concern "is simply ridiculous" then the option isn't "on the table."

If "all option are on the table" then the concern is legitimate.

Bush Tries To Allay E.U. Worry Over Iran
Notion of U.S. Attack 'Is Simply Ridiculous'
By Michael A. Fletcher and Keith B. Richburg

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page A01

BRUSSELS, Feb. 22 -- President Bush said Tuesday that concern about possible U.S. military action against Iran "is simply ridiculous," but he added at a news conference that "all options are on the table" in dealing with suspected Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear weapons.

After meeting with NATO and European Union officials, Bush welcomed modest pledges from opponents of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to help train and equip security forces there. While U.S. and European officials said there was an improved tone in their discussions, serious divisions remained over U.S. policy toward Iran and the Bush administration's objection to European plans to lift an arms embargo against China.

Quote of note:

Call this journalistic malpractice. Recently both the Times and Post ran front-page stories reporting -- in tones of shock -- that the costs of the Medicare drug benefit were rising rapidly. The stories were misleading; all that had changed about the estimates is that two early years (with little spending) had been dropped and two later years (with lots of spending) had been added. If the media had reported accurately two years ago, there would be no shock today.

The malpractice continues. The disagreeable reality is that the baby boom's sheer weight will sooner or later force cuts in Social Security and Medicare. We ought to be debating them now and giving people warning. But almost everyone has a stake in denial, and the media are complicit. Personal accounts -- like them or not -- don't solve the real problem. If journalists were doing their jobs, everyone would know that.

Journalistic Malpractice
By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, February 23, 2005; Page A19

It's always necessary to do the math. By this I mean that journalists need to measure politicians' promises against underlying realities, as represented by numbers. But many reporters detest math. This math phobia partly explains why the media did such an abysmal job covering the debate over the Medicare drug benefit -- ignoring the program's long-term costs -- and why they're committing a similar blunder with President Bush's Social Security plan. They're missing the obvious: The plan doesn't address baby boomers' retirement costs.

Our central budget problem, as I've noted in earlier columns, is the coming spending explosion in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, driven by aging baby boomers and rising health spending. In 2004 these programs cost $965 billion, or 8.4 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). The Congressional Budget Office projects that by 2030 their costs will rise to 14 percent of GDP, or more than $1.6 trillion in today's dollars. Avoiding a (nearly) $700 billion annual increase in taxes or deficits would require comparable spending cuts in other government programs. It won't happen. The projected increase in retirement spending nearly equals all federal "discretionary spending" -- a category that includes defense, homeland security, environmental programs, national parks, scientific research and much more. We're not going to eliminate all these programs.

Once you've done this math, you recognize that benefit cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are inevitable. They're the only other way to limit massive tax increases or immense budget deficits. Moreover, the benefit cuts have to affect baby boomers, because they will be the people on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The critical period occurs from 2011 to 2029, when all baby boomers (people born from 1946 to 1964) hit 65. That's when budgetary pressures intensify. So, does the Bush Social Security plan improve the budget outlook? From all indications, the answer is "no."

CAMILLA BANNED FROM WHITE HOUSE
Feb 20 2005
Dubya bars Camilla from White House ..because she is a divorcee
By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor

GEORGE Bush has banned Camilla Parker Bowles from the White House - because she is a divorcee.

The unprecedented snub has effectively sabotaged Charles's plan to take his bride on a Royal tour of America later this year.

The trip would have been the pair's first official tour as a married couple.

But the US President - a notoriously right-wing Christian and reformed alcoholic - told aides it was "inappropriate" for him to be playing host to the newly-weds, who are both divorcees.

The decision was made even though the late President Ronald Reagan was divorced.

A Government insider said: "It was relayed to us from Washington that Mrs Parker Bowles would not be welcome at the White House.

"The Americans are aware that the visit will be subject to a lot of media attent ion and did not want the President drawn into what they view to be a public relations exercise.

"It's now uncertain if the visit will even go ahead."

Some Inheritance
Published: February 23, 2005

...Under the president's proposal, when you retired you would not be able to start spending the money in your private account until after you bought an annuity, a financial contract in which you hand over a lump-sum payment and, in return, get a monthly stream of income for life. The upside of buying such an annuity would be that you'd be protected against outliving all of your money. The downside is that even if you died immediately after retirement, the most your heirs would inherit would be the amount that remained in your private account after you had paid for the mandatory annuity. (If you lived longer, of course, you might well need to spend the remainder to supplement the annuity's low monthly payout. )

The idea of making the private accounts part of one's estate is particularly appealing to low- and middle-income earners, who may not have all that much to leave to their heirs under normal circumstances. But those are exactly the people who would have to use the largest share of their accounts to buy annuities. The government would require that annuities be large enough to keep recipients above the poverty line for life. The less you had to start with, the less you'd have left over after buying the mandatory annuity.

...Under the president's proposal, when you retired, your traditional Social Security retirement benefit would be cut by an amount equal to all the deposits you had made into your private account plus interest. (The interest would be three percentage points higher than the rate of inflation.[P6: This is the Retirement Tax]) The benefit cut would be each person's contribution to repaying the huge debt the Bush administration would take on to "pay for" privatization.

But if you died before you retired, you would have already used some of that borrowed money to set up the private account and yet would never have made any contribution to repaying the debt. So in that case, how would the government recoup your share of the amount it had borrowed? Well, it could let your share of the debt go unpaid - in effect bequeathing to your heirs and their fellow citizens ever-higher deficits. Or your spouse could inherit your private account and the benefit cut that went with it. Or the government could take its cut from your private account before the money went to your survivors - a grab that could wipe out your stash. [P6: This is the Death Tax]

But I'm afraid the Abu Ghraib torture "scandal" proves there is little that can move Americans from their complacency and indifference for more than a week or so.

The Secret Genocide Archive
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Photos don't normally appear on this page. But it's time for all of us to look squarely at the victims of our indifference.

These are just four photos in a secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.

This African Union archive is classified, but it was shared with me by someone who believes that Americans will be stirred if they can see the consequences of their complacency.

Real Estate Is Still Surging in Harlem, a Study Finds

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: February 23, 2005

...It is impossible for Willie Katherine Suggs, president of the Harlem brokerage firm that bears her name, to overlook the change. "There are blocks in Harlem that bear no resemblance to what they looked like 10 years ago," Ms. Suggs said. "Right outside my door, it was like somebody bombed it out - vacant lots, vacant buildings. Now there are two nine-story luxury buildings, and they are doing a third one on the north side of 145th Street."

Seen over a 10-year period, Harlem's renewal is even more evident. The Elliman report tracked 8,653 co-op and condo sales for all of Manhattan last year, up 77.9 percent from 4,865 sales in 1995. In Harlem last year, there were 473 co-op and condo sales, a 164 percent jump from 179 sales in 1995. The report is based on closed transactions for all brokerage firms in Manhattan.

There has been, not surprisingly, a corresponding surge in prices. The average sales price for all of Manhattan in 2004 was $1,004,232, up 18.1 percent from $850,340 in 2003, and up 140.5 percent since 1995, the report said. In Harlem, the average price in 2004 was $358,657, up 36.9 percent from $261,951 in 2003, and up 333.7 percent from $82,693 in 1995.

The median price in Manhattan last year was $605,859, up 22.4 percent from $495,000 in 2003, and up 192 percent from $207,500 in 1995. In Harlem, the median price in 2004 was $305,490, rising by 32.8 percent over the median of $230,000 in 2003, and bounding up by 350 percent from $68,000 in 1995.

Ms. Suggs credits city housing policy for the boom. "You have city money involved," she said. "If you agreed to keep prices affordable, you got tax breaks and all kinds of incentives. And investors took advantage of them. Where else could you get a two-bedroom apartment for $190,000?"

Now, most of those subsidized, renovated apartments are gone, "and nonsubsidized apartments start at $450,000 and go up to over a million," Ms. Suggs continued. "It became the self-fulfilling prophecy."

Harvard President Vows to Temper His Style With Respect

By SARA RIMER and PATRICK D. HEALY

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 22 - With his faculty threatening open revolt, the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, promised Tuesday that he would temper his management style and begin treating people more respectfully.

Professors, gathered at an overflow faculty meeting to hear and discuss Dr. Summers, appeared so dissatisfied with the state of his leadership that they rejected a proposal to have three senior Harvard scholars mediate the furor between the faculty and its president.

After five weeks of mea culpas for his remarks about women in the sciences, Dr. Summers issued yet another apology. He promised professors that they would no longer experience the intimidation, anger and hurt feelings that many of them have reported in his three-and-a-half-year tenure.

"I am committed to opening a new chapter in my work with you," he told some 500 faculty and staff members, according to a copy of his remarks. "To start, I pledge to you that I will seek to listen more and more carefully and to temper my words and actions in ways that convey respect and help us work together more harmoniously."

"No doubt I will not always get things right. But I am determined to set a different tone."

He also promised to pay greater respect to the powers of the faculty on matters like undergraduate education, which he has sought to re-shape.

But the deep concern over his management appeared likely to continue, at least in private. Some critics said after the meeting that Dr. Summers was so damaged that his chance of being a great Harvard president was over. Others praised him as trying to reach out.

Quote of note:

"Twenty-six nations sat around the table saying, 'You know, let's get the past behind us, and now let's focus on helping the world's newest democracy succeed,' " he said at a news conference here with the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

The past is behind us...but close enough that everyone can still hear its footsteps.

Asked if he was satisfied with the token contributions, Mr. Bush said, "Every contribution helps."

...especially when you know that's all you're going to get.

Anyway...

NATO Agrees on Modest Plan for Training Iraqi Forces

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

BRUSSELS, Feb. 22 - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced agreement on Tuesday over a modest plan to train and equip Iraq's new security forces, a symbolic display of unity but one that is unlikely to translate into a sharp change in Iraq.

Responding to intense lobbying by the Bush administration, all 26 countries of the alliance committed to aid training in some way, even though some of the financial contributions were meager and several nations refused to send trainers to Iraq.

The agreement came after France quietly dropped its refusal to take part under a NATO umbrella on Tuesday. It pledged $660,000 to an alliance fund for military and police training in Iraq and has assigned one French midlevel officer to the training mission at the organization's headquarters near Brussels, French and American officials said.

The United States is eager to get the security forces whipped into fighting form as soon as possible, both to restore stability to Iraq and to allow the eventual withdrawal of the 150,000 American troops.

But the training mission is going much more slowly than expected. In Congressional testimony this month, two senior Pentagon officials acknowledged that less than a third of the Iraqi security forces that the Pentagon says have been trained are capable of tackling the most dangerous missions. Iraqi Army units are suffering severe troop shortages, officials said, and absenteeism and even corruption in the security forces is a problem.

"All 26 allies are contributing to the NATO mission to assist in training Iraqi security forces, to hasten the day when they can take full responsibility for the stability of the country and the security of its citizens," the communiqué said after a summit meeting here brought together President Bush and other leaders of alliance nations.

Quote of note:

"The issue is not only the names of the people," Mustafa Barghouti, a doctor and opposition activist who was a distant second to Mr. Abbas in the Palestinian election for president last month, said of the list. "It will depend on the program. What worries me most is that we haven't seen true progress on any reform. This is about a corrupt system where favoritism prevails. This kind of political nepotism is totally unacceptable," he said.

Palestinian Agrees to Reshape Cabinet With New Faces

By ALAN COWELL

JERUSALEM, Feb. 22 - Under pressure from legislators, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, pledged Tuesday to reshape his cabinet, bringing in some nonpolitical figures after lawmakers challenged his previous team of loyalists from the Yasir Arafat era.

The choice of a new cabinet with fewer ties to the past could help Mahmoud Abbas, the newly elected Palestinian president, embark on reforms sought by many Palestinians - as well as the governments of Israel and the United States - after the newest truce in more than four years of Palestinian uprising.

Mr. Qurei said he would present his new list to the Palestinian parliament for approval on Wednesday, but he did not give details of names or policies. A previous list composed mostly of old-guard loyalists drew threats of a no-confidence vote from legislators possibly positioning themselves for parliamentary elections in July.

He said that "we have agreed that the next government will be from outside" the parliament. The 84-member legislature is known as the Palestine Legislative Council and is dominated by the Fatah movement led by Mr. Abbas.

Some legislators said Mr. Qurei's maneuver represented what Rafik Natshe, a Fatah member and former cabinet minister, called "a real change."

Ahmed al-Batsh, another Fatah legislator, said: "This is real democracy. This is the first time we succeeded in expressing the ambitions of the Palestinian people in changing a government that has no confidence in the street."

Quote of note:

The kind of information disclosed in this case does not often become public, employment lawyers say, because most companies settle discrimination suits before they reach the class certification stage. One reason settlements are attractive, of course, is to keep potentially embarrassing information confidential.

Questions Arise of Possible Bias at Drug Maker

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

At Johnson & Johnson, the director of equal opportunity was worried. The company, she warned in a memo written in the late 1990's - the exact date is unclear - had "areas of vulnerability" to employment discrimination lawsuits.

As it turned out, she was right. And the memo, written by Marion HochbergSmith and intended to prod Johnson & Johnson, the giant drug company, into making improvements, could now end up serving as an unintended legal weapon against it.

That memo, along with other documents submitted to a federal court in New Jersey, emerged publicly yesterday in support of a motion to certify a lawsuit filed in 2001 by several African-American and Hispanic employees as a class action. The documents open a rare window into the workings of a big company coping with how to hire and promote fairly.

...The suit does not claim that the company simply refused to hire the employees who are the plaintiffs, but that executives knew years ago that they were missing their targets for promoting such employees - and did little to solve the problem.

The employees who sued (some have since left the company) claimed that they were unfairly passed over for promotions and that they unfairly received lower pay and smaller bonuses than their white colleagues. They also contended that they were hired into positions earning less than their experience and education justified, and that they were steered into less prestigious business lines at the company.

...The lawsuit essentially claims that Johnson & Johnson executives knew of the problems identified in Ms. HochbergSmith's memo and did not take adequate steps to remedy them. In addition to the claim that the company maintained a "glass ceiling" that unfairly blocked some minority employees from advancement, the complaint asserts that the company maintained internal "glass walls" that tended to confine black and Hispanic employees to career paths within less prestigious businesses.

It also put black and Hispanic employees into lower-paying positions when they first joined the company, the lawsuit contends, ensuring that they would never close wage gaps with white peers of comparable qualifications.

Shiite Alliance in Iraq Wants Islamist as the Prime Minister
By JOHN F. BURNS and DEXTER FILKINS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 - Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite doctor with an Islamist bent, was chosen Tuesday by the victorious Shiite alliance as its candidate to become Iraq's new prime minister. The decision may well open a period of protracted and rancorous negotiations with a coalition of secular leaders intent on sharply curtailing Dr. Jaafari's powers or blocking him and his clerical-backed coalition.

Ayad Allawi, the current prime minister, and Barham Salih, a Kurdish politician and deputy prime minister, said in separate interviews on Tuesday that without guarantees renouncing sectarianism and embracing Western democratic ideals they were poised to block Dr. Jaafari's nomination and possibly peel off enough members from the Shiite's United Iraqi Alliance to form a government of their own.

About a week ago I got nervous about the F.E.C. getting involved in what blogs do. Well, it would seem this is at least part of the reason for such a thing.

Some of the real reporters in the White House pressroom were apparently annoyed at Gannon's presence and his softball, partisan questions, but considered him only a minor irritant. One told me he thought of Gannon as a balance for the opinionated liberal questions of Hearst's Helen Thomas. But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.

One of Gannon's first projects was an attempt to discredit the South Dakota Argus Leader, South Dakota's major paper, and its longtime political writer, David Kranz. According to the National Journal, which reported on this last November, Gannon wrote a series of articles in the summer of 2003 alleging that Kranz, who went to college with Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, was not only sympathetic to him but was an actual part of the Daschle campaign. These articles then got a huge amount of play on the blogs of John Lauck and Jason Van Beek, and were picked up by other conservative sites and talk radio. The paper was bombarded with messages about its bias and acknowledges that these had an impact on its coverage.

Daschle opponent John Thune's campaign manager was Dick Wadham, an old political crony of Karl Rove's; the kind of pal Rove could ask to hire his first cousin, John Wood, a few years back. Wadham put the bloggers on the campaign payroll and the symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and "reporter" Gannon continued. On September 29, Gannon broke the story that Daschle had claimed a special tax exemption for a house in Washington and the bloggers jumped all over it. According to a November 17 posting on South Dakota Politics   a site that Van Beek, who has become a staffer for now-Sen. Thune, has bequeathed to Lauck   "Jeff Gannon, whose reportage had a dramatic impact on the Daschle v. Thune race (his story about Sen. Daschle signing a legal document claiming to be a D.C. resident was published nearly the same day Thune began to run an ad showing Daschle saying, "I'm a D.C. resident) has written an analysis of the debacle."

Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research." The connections are so strong that there is an FEC challenge which could be a test case on the limits of the use of the Internet in federal campaigns.

This is commentary on the article I posted last night.

They got off to a bad start.

AJC: How do you define being a conservative?

Cobb: I'm thinking more of behavioral type things like taking personal responsibility. Beliefs and behaviors that move you to the next level. That resonates with me more than anything.

Hullum: To me, conservatism goes back to family structure. And to me it goes back to accountability and morals.

I wonder if we'll ever have a discussion in The King's English instead of verbal cartoons. Terms of art like "personal responsibility" and "family structure" do not define anything anyone disagrees with. I would like Black Republicans to state plainly what they feel differentiates them from the rest of the community.

Bartell: Conservatism for me means to have a reliable base for national defense and to take a leadership role in defense of the international community, being the superpower that we are.

What the hell has that got to do with Conservatism? As many Democrats as have stepped forward to support invading Iraq, as hard as they pushed until Bush had no choice but to accept an investigation of the run-up to 9/11 (he fought it, remember), the hallucination that only Republicans favor a strong national defense can only be supported by ignoring the facts. If it weren't for Congressional Democrats there would be no Department of Homeland Defense. There would have been no review of the intelligence system. Bush and his crew can only take credit for recognizing the inevitable.

AJC: Is a strong value system something you think is not prevalent in the Democratic Party?

Cobb: For me it's not. For example, Armstrong Williams —  big snafu with him. He comes out and says, "Hey, I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it and I apologize." If I typically see a Democratic politician, they're going to fight it nail and tooth, even though they know it was really wrong. That's just the big picture for me, not taking responsibility when it's clearly wrong. Especially if you're stealing money from the state or the city or whatever, and then you say, "Oh, why are you indicting me?" [That's not] taking responsibility.

I would like to see an example of a Democratic politician caught wrong and fighting it tooth and nail. And Armstrong Williams is not a politician. It's hard to see someone equating Williams with any elected official and take them seriously.

Anyway, we see how the discussion is to be framed. I keep that in mind as I read. But there's stuff that confuses me.

Cobb: I think [blacks] have a difficulty with saying, "Oh, I'm a Republican," because the broader Republican Party has a branding problem. Some [white Republicans] have a little bit of difficulty with the whole thing possibly becoming darker.

The party becoming darker, the way it was with the Democrats. I was down in South Georgia and a lot of folks are really happy with the Republican Party. We've done a heck of a job out there working for them. But I don't think folks want people to say at [election time], "Wow, the Republican Party's becoming more and more African-American. Now, where are we gonna go?'"

It's kind of that Catch-22.

That's not a "branding problem."

AJC: Where is the disconnect between the Republicans and how you feel as black person in this country, state and community?

Bartell: The disconnect is in leadership. Many positions by leaders in the Republican Party have been dictated by special interest groups. Particularly corporate special interest groups. There needs to be a new kind of leadership that understands the diversity of America and is willing to include that voice in the public policy process.

Cobb: [We] agree on that. In Georgia especially.

Gould: One of my problems with the Republican Party is that it does not ever court the black vote. They won't spend any time or energy trying to recruit us or trying to re-educate people about what they really stand for in the black community. We have all these ideas in our community about what the Republican Party stands for, and a lot of those notions are based on things that are not true.

Hullum: I think there is just an ignorance today, which is surprising because there is so much information available to us. People don't even understand what the Republican Party is. [To many, politics is] just black and white.

Harris: Rich and poor.

Hullum: I have a lot of friends who seem confused when I tell them I'm a Republican.

Okay, they know this. And accept it.

Bartell: The only opportunity is an opportunity to teach. I don't think [we should expect] Republican leadership to understand diversity. What I expect is for those of us who are of African descent, whether they're African-American or not, to teach the leadership of the Republican Party and teach members of the black community.

...because there seems to be a deep misunderstanding of how politics works.

The Memory Hole, via Professor Kim

As of 7 January 2005, the website of the US Commission on Civil Rights has been purged of 20 reports that didn't meet the approval of the agency's Republican majority.

The site says that you may still order copies of these reports, but, tellingly, they require that you give them a physical mailing address. In other words, they'll send you a paper copy of a report, not an easily-postable electronic copy.

The Memory Hole was able to locate 17 19 of these deleted reports. They have been posted below. (If you can find any of the other three, please send them.)

via D.C Thornton

The Right's Right
By Ryan Sager

Welcome to the furthest right reaches of the right: the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC for short. Here, evolution is a wild hypothesis, "Log Cabin Republican" is a slur and young women know they have to wear short skirts to get ahead.

...The message in that regard was clear: We Christians can do this alone, y'all who ain't down with J.C. best be running along.

That was the message when Tamar Jacoby of the Manhattan Institute, who was on a panel to defend President Bush's proposed immigration reforms (supported by no less a conservative institution than The Wall Street Journal), was loudly booed by the anti-immigrant crowd. That was the message when a representative of the Log Cabin Republicans was booed and then asked by a student, "You people [homosexuals, that is] already have the right to live together, you got the sex, what else do you people want?" 

In fact, if there was anything particularly striking about this year's CPAC, it is to just what extent Republicans have given up being the party of small government and individual liberty. 

Make absolutely no mistake about it: This party, among its most hard-core supporters, is not about freedom anymore. It is about foisting its members' version of morality and economic intervention on the country. It is, in other words, the mirror image of its hated enemy.

There's a Black Conservatives Yahoo! group.

I know because someone in there linked to this post, and the title of the post (which, as a non-member, is all I can see) begins thus:

Black_Conservatives · I'm Black, and I'm Right! Are you tired of the same old song from the same old left-wing suspects? Do the "leaders" of today

I would deduce someone is complaining about the opening line:

It must be nice to be a Republican leader. You can just lie. In fact, it seems you must.

Quote of note:

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," [California Rep. Chris Cox] crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

I wonder what could possibly be mustered as a defense for that claim?

The title of the post that bothers the children so is How do you deal with such mass delusion?

The question stands.

I find it ridiculous to even have this discussion when insulin and syringes for diabetic are not covered. We're talking about something necessary to stay alive, not just to stay lively.

I do have a suggestion, though. Sell the drugs over the counter. Trust me, you'll make more money that way...and isn't that what this is really all about?

Companies Fight to Ensure Coverage for Erectile Drugs
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 - Drug companies are strenuously resisting bipartisan efforts in Congress to prohibit Medicare from paying for Viagra and other drugs for erectile dysfunction.

The issue of whether Medicare's new prescription drug benefit should cover such treatments is raising broader questions of ethics, economics, politics and health policy.

...The debate centers on whether a drug used to enhance sexual performance should even be eligible for Medicare coverage. Proponents of providing the coverage say that erectile dysfunction often has a physical cause and that treatment can significantly improve the quality of a man's life. Opponents say that Medicare, already growing at an unsustainable rate, cannot afford to pay for "lifestyle drugs."

Administration officials said recently that, under their reading of the new Medicare drug benefit, they had to pay for drugs like Viagra, Levitra and Cialis when they were prescribed.

...though it seems Black Republicans are writing their lines.

Quote of note:

"Now the election of 2004 is over," said Christopher Barron, the Log Cabin Republicans' political director. "And we think there are opportunities to work with this president. The fact is the gay and lesbian community has to realize that the president won."

When will these idiots realize the Republican Party has absolutely no reason to accept them? That the Republican coalition will either fracture badly or punish those politicians that accept gays that do anything except lobby against gay rights?

Anyway...

Gay Conservatives to Work With GOP

Log Cabin Republicans Attend Conservative Conference With Hopes of Working With GOP

By MARC AMBINDER

Feb. 20, 2005 - The Log Cabin Republicans, a lobbying group for gay Republicans, is regrouping after an election proved a national consensus against gay marriage has broadened its legislative goals this year. The group is reaching out to conservative organizations and vowing to be a partner with the Bush administration.

The group, which claims thousands of dues-paying members, paid $3,000 to co-sponsor the Conservative Political Action Conference, marking the first time a gay rights group has been officially recognized by the nation's annual gathering of conservative activists. They've also begun to lobby members of Congress about Social Security reform, changes to the tax code and immigration.

Both Vice President Dick Cheney and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove addressed the conservative conference last week.

Last year, the Log Cabin Republicans declined to endorse Bush's re-election because the president had campaigned to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages. They lobbied hard to have the GOP remove the amendment from its platform before the Republican National Convention, but lost that battle as well.

The group formed an informal public affairs partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading liberal gay rights group, and spent heavily on advertisements criticizing the administration's position on the amendment.

When a student is given vouchers for private school because their public school "failed," does the private school have to be better than the school they left? Is there any assurance the private school would not fail the same standard? Or are we simply assuming it must be better because it's private?

Bush: Issue more vouchers
Gov. Jeb Bush is expected to propose offering private-school vouchers to students who have failed the reading part of the FCAT for three consecutive years.
BY GARY FINEOUT

TALLAHASSEE- Six years after creating the nation's first statewide school voucher program, Gov. Jeb Bush will this week propose a massive expansion of the use of vouchers, offering them to any student in Florida who has failed the state reading test for three years in a row.

The proposal will be part of a comprehensive package of K-12 education law changes that some are already calling ''A-plus-plus,'' or a sequel to the ambitious A+ Plan that was the centerpiece of Bush's 1998 campaign for governor.

The A+ Plan resulted in the expanded use of high-stakes testing as well as sanctions and rewards for schools depending on how their students scored.

Besides vouchers -- which allow eligible students to switch to private schools at state expense -- the governor's new proposal will allow schools to offer different levels of pay to teachers, including those who are needed for specific subjects such as science and math.

The bill will also push back the testing date of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT, to give students more time to learn.

''The overall goal of the legislation is to attract more teachers to the teaching profession and assist students in having academic success in the middle grades,'' said state Sen. Evelyn Lynn, an Ormond Beach Republican who has agreed to sponsor the bill on behalf of Bush.

The governor, who cannot seek reelection in November 2006 because of term limits, has made it clear he wants to protect his legacy of education reforms once he's no longer in office. Included in his to-do list is boosting reading scores, a goal that has already led to more money being spent on reading programs in schools and tax breaks for book purchases.

Quote of note:

...a president can always change the subject to national security if he wants to - and Mr. Bush has repeatedly shown himself willing to play the terrorism card when he is losing the debate on other issues. So it's important to point out that Mr. Bush, for all his posturing, has done a very bad job of protecting the nation - and to make that point now, rather than in the heat of the next foreign crisis.

Wag-the-Dog Protection

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The campaign against Social Security is going so badly that longtime critics of President Bush, accustomed to seeing their efforts to point out flaws in administration initiatives brushed aside, are pinching themselves. But they shouldn't relax: if the past is any guide, the Bush administration will soon change the subject back to national security.

The political landscape today reminds me of the spring of 2002, after the big revelations of corporate fraud. Then as now, the administration was on the defensive, and Democrats expected to do well in midterm elections.

Then, suddenly, it was all Iraq, all the time, and Harken Energy and Halliburton vanished from the headlines.

I don't know which foreign threat the administration will start playing up this time, but Bush critics should be prepared for the shift. They must curb their natural inclination to focus almost exclusively on domestic issues, and challenge the administration on national security policy, too.

Latin America Fails to Deliver on Basic Needs

By JUAN FORERO

EL ALTO, Bolivia - Piped water, like the runoff from the glaciers above this city, runs tantalizingly close to Remedios Cuyuña's home. But with no way to pay the $450 hookup fee charged by the French-run waterworks, she washes her clothes and bathes her three children in frigid well water beside a fetid creek.

So in January, when legions of angry residents rose up against the company, she eagerly joined in. The fragile government of President Carlos Mesa, hoping to avert the same kind of uprising that toppled his predecessor in 2003, then took a step that proved popular but shook foreign investors to their core. It canceled the contract of Aguas del Illimani, a subsidiary of the $53 billion French giant Suez, effectively tossing it out of the country and leaving the state responsible.

"For us, this is good," Ms. Cuyuña said, voicing the sentiment in much of El Alto. "Maybe now, they will charge us less."

That is far from certain. Even less certain is how she and 130 million other Latin Americans will get clean water anytime soon in a region where providing basic services remains among the most pressing public health and political issues.

Governments like Bolivia's tried the task themselves before, abandoned it as too costly, and turned to private companies in the 1990's. Today as privatization is rejected, foreign investment is plummeting across the region and the challenge is being returned to states perhaps less equipped than a decade ago.

The trend is not unique to Bolivia, where a lack of clean water contributes to the death of every tenth child before the age of 5, and it has presented Latin American leaders with a nettlesome question: what now?

"The decisions that have to be made are stark and difficult," said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. "They're going to have to make some sort of compromise, and that compromise often means buying back and taking over those services - and then, of course, making them efficient in the hands of the state. Their track record doing this in the past was miserable."

Indeed, the heated backlash against free-market changes - fueled by the sense that they promised more than they delivered while offering overpriced, often flawed services - has at once left governments vulnerable to volatile protests and forced foreign companies to retreat.

Power plays preoccupy Iraqi leaders

Officials hope to resolve a protracted battle over the prime ministership this week.

By Jill Carroll and Dan Murphy

BAGHDAD - As Shiites prepare to take ownership of Iraq's new government, power struggles over the post of prime minister are exposing the fragility of the winning United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) - as well as a fractious political landscape.

Islamist Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jaafari had been heavily favored to take the post last week. But a challenge by the head of the secular Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, threw the process into extended negotiations, even as Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi first withdrew and then reappeared as a possible compromise candidate.

The protracted dispute is raising concerns about the new government's prospects for dealing with the far more divisive challenge of writing a new constitution - as well as the insurgency and the restoration of basic services.

"Jobs, electricity, and security are what Iraqis need and are demanding, and if this government gets wrapped up in obscure debates about constitutional niceties then this thing will consume them," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary University of London. "The great danger is that those 275 individuals will go into the 'green zone' and disappear into the internecine politics of the green zone."

Quote of note:

Critics of the decision say the Connecticut high court confused "public use" with "public benefit." They say if the ruling is upheld by the US Supreme Court, any property in the country could be seized and turned over to a private company that promises to produce higher tax revenues from that property.

Public use, property rights and the courts

A Connecticut battle between property rights and government power comes before the Supreme Court.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON - Property rights in the United States are at a constitutional crossroads.

Increasingly, in towns and cities across the nation, local governments are seizing and demolishing private homes to assemble large tracts of land needed for economic development projects.

Homeowners say their constitutional right to own private property is being violated. Local officials counter that their actions are permitted by the Constitution and are necessary to ensure the long-term prosperity of their communities.

Tuesday, the US Supreme Court takes up a potential landmark case that asks the justices to strike the proper balance between the right to own private property and the government's power to seize that same piece of property for a broader public good. How a majority of justices strike that balance will define the scope of property rights in America, perhaps for generations, analysts say.

"Cities have been going along with almost no guidance from the Supreme Court for almost half a century," says Dana Berliner, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice in Washington. "Whatever [the justices] say is going to have a large impact."

The case, Kelo v. New London, involves an effort by homeowners in New London, Conn., to prevent the city from using its power of eminent domain to demolish their houses to make way for a 90-acre economic development project.

The city says the project is necessary to generate much-needed tax revenues and new jobs. Residents say it amounts to a land grab, with the city taking their property and giving it to a private developer for $1 a year in the hope that commercial development will yield more taxes than private homes have.

The Constitution's Fifth Amendment mandates that private property may be taken by the government if fair compensation is paid to the owner. But there is a second requirement. The property may be taken only if it is for "public use."

The precise issue the Supreme Court justices must decide is whether a privately owned development project amounts to a "public use."

The most common and accepted public use of private property occurs when the government takes land for government facilities like a public highway, public school, or military base. Public use also includes the taking of property for privately owned businesses such as railroads, power companies, and other firms that need contiguous land to offer regulated services to the public. Public-use takings have also occurred to eliminate urban blight.

But the New London case implicates the most controversial application of the public-use rationale.

Lawyers for the city of New London say it is up to elected representatives to decide land use and economic development issues. Judges must show deference to the sometimes tough economic decisions made by legislative and municipal officials, they say.

State supreme courts are divided on the issue. Eight state supreme courts have ruled that private economic development does not amount to a public use and have barred condemnations in such cases. They are Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, South Carolina, and Washington.

Six state high courts have ruled that private economic development projects are a public use. Those states are Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, and Connecticut.

Time for Bush to define 'independent press'

By Dante Chinni

...The Guckert fiasco first surfaced because of a Jan. 26 press conference where President Bush called on Gannon/Guckert, who asked the president how he could work with Senate Democrats when they "seem to have divorced themselves from reality." Bush, like any good politician, stepped into that fat one and answered by giving a short outline of his many policy plans.

What was more interesting than that exchange, however, was the one that immediately preceded it at the same press conference - a back-and-forth with reporters about the administration's paying reporters for positive coverage, as the Education Department did with Armstrong Williams. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," the president said.

The question is where Guckert fits into all this. True, the White House didn't pay him for coverage, we assume. But how exactly do he,and pseudo-reporters like him qualify as journalists and help create the "nice independent relationship" the president says he seeks?

Talon News is essentially a "news" mouthpiece for a conservative advocacy website called GOPUSA - that's GOP, as in Grand Old Party. The editor in chief of Talon is president of GOPUSA. On the conservative website Free Republic, Guckert called on others who use the site to demonstrate at Kerry headquarters during the presidential campaign. And many of his stories contained verbatim repeats of White House press releases.

So what? All journalists are biased in some way, say some conservatives. True, journalists are humans, and all humans are biased in some way. But Guckert crossed the line from having a bias to being a propagandist and party activist. Online he was a White House ditto-machine masquerading as reporter, and in the pressroom he was a safe place for Scott McClellan to go when the White House press secretary needed a lifeline during televised briefings.

For the average TV viewer, there's no difference between Guckert and the correspondents of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or the paper you're reading now, for that matter. And that's troublesome.

Even after the president's call for an independent relationship with the press, Guckert was back in the White House pressroom. Mr. McClellan even defended Guckert's place there. It was only later, when blogs exposed Guckert's previous Web exploits, that he resigned from Talon News.

It may be time for the White House to define some terms for all of us. What does a "nice independent relationship" with the press really mean? It's easy to see how people like Guckert fit with the "nice" part (at least from the White House perspective); it's the "independent" part that's not clear.

via Minority Report

Jeff Gannon aka James Gukert has an interesting perspective on the impact of the controversy over his press credentials on his career:

Jeff Gannon is considering suing liberal interest groups, bloggers and others for a "political assassination" that drove him from his job as a reporter for a conservative news outfit called Talon News, he told NEWSWEEK. Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, singled out Media Matters -- a "well-funded" liberal group headed by longtime "attack dog" David Brock. ("Everything we wrote about him came from the public record," Brock replied.)

You conservative types should recognize that this would open you up to legal action by everyone whose scalp hanging on your belt. And since y'all started it you got more scalps...and hence more vulnerability.

States' Private Pensions Make a Weak Showing
The retirement accounts have had less appeal and spottier success than Bush plan's projections.
By Peter G. Gosselin
Times Staff Writer

February 22, 2005

WASHINGTON   President Bush believes Americans are so eager to join the "ownership society" that, given a chance, two-thirds of those eligible would divert funds from Social Security into the personal investment accounts he proposes.

But when public employees in seven states were offered the opportunity for similar accounts during the last decade, nowhere near two-thirds signed up for them. In many instances, the figure was closer to 5%.

Bush has argued in campaign-style events from Fargo, N.D., to Blue Bell, Pa., that Social Security account holders could make more money for retirement on their own than they can count on from the New Deal-era fixed-benefit program.

But when Nebraska's state and county workers were given do-it-yourself accounts, they made so many investment errors that they ended up making less than colleagues with fixed-benefit pensions   and less than what analysts have said is needed for old age. Their poor performance led the Nebraska Legislature two years ago to junk the accounts for new employees.

While Americans are just beginning to grapple with the president's proposal for private accounts, employees and retirement officials in Michigan, Montana, Washington, West Virginia and other states have discovered that the accounts can fall far short of their promise. Their experiences sound a cautionary note for Bush as well as for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has proposed switching public employees to private accounts starting in 2007.

Black Republicans talk about the GOP
Some say whites don't want a 'darker party'
Published on: 02/18/05

A roundtable discussion was held at the Northside bureau of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with six African-American men and woman who describe themselves as politically conservative and who support the Republican Party. The group fielded a variety of questions about race and politics from Northside reporter Adrianne Murchison and Todd C. Duncan,the Northside editor.

The participants were Sherry Gould of Dunwoody, Ray Cobb of Gwinnett, Leoni Harris of Roswell, Ed Adiotomre of Marietta, Kristi Hullum of east Cobb and Al Bartell of Atlanta.

AJC: How do you define being a conservative?

Cobb: I'm thinking more of behavioral type things like taking personal responsibility. Beliefs and behaviors that move you to the next level. That resonates with me more than anything.

Hullum: To me, conservatism goes back to family structure. And to me it goes back to accountability and morals.

Bartell: Conservatism for me means to have a reliable base for national defense and to take a leadership role in defense of the international community, being the superpower that we are.

I'm as much for peace as anybody. Peace [means] having a strong defense. Democrats want [to achieve it] without having a powerful reference point. It concerns me that that liberal view puts us all at risk internationally for weapons of mass destruction.

AJC: Is a strong value system something you think is not prevalent in the Democratic Party?

Cobb: For me it's not. For example, Armstrong Williams   big snafu with him. He comes out and says, "Hey, I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it and I apologize." If I typically see a Democratic politician, they're going to fight it nail and tooth, even though they know it was really wrong. That's just the big picture for me, not taking responsibility when it's clearly wrong. Especially if you're stealing money from the state or the city or whatever, and then you say, "Oh, why are you indicting me?" [That's not] taking responsibility.

AJC: President Bush has been criticized for not acknowledging mistakes he may have made along the way. Is that criticism valid?

Cobb: For me it's about when he gets information. This is a dynamic situation that he's making decisions upon. This thing is moving. One piece of information might be relevant at one minute and the next minute, no. So, if you do hindsight quarterbacking, then he made some bad mistakes. I think we can clearly cite some things he probably should have done differently. I don't know if he would satisfy the public if he said, "Hey, I really did make a big, big boo-boo."

Harris: [Bush] has to make the ultimate decisions that are best for everyone involved. . . . I don't see anyone praising him when he does something good.

AJC: Is conservatism more about issues like national defense or is it about personal accountability and family values?

Gould: I don't think it's any one thing.

Cobb: If I get rid of this idea of national security, I'm still left with my personal responsibility at the end of the day. If the world changes. I'm still left with my responsibility.

I grew up in Chicago [with a single mom who] didn't accept welfare. I had a brother and a sister. If my mom had taken welfare, no one would have blamed her in the 1960s. She chose a different route for herself. She worked her way, retired   ultimately from AT&T   after 30 years. And to get that support, she had tomove us to Toledo, Ohio, when I was in high school because her mom was there. There was much more of a support system.

AJC: Most African-Americans tend to vote Democratic. Do you think their values differ from yours?

Harris: Not much.

Gould: That's the one thing that's always surprised me. Georgia Democrats were always very different from the rest of the United States. Much more conservative family values, until probably the 1990 election when you really started to see the change [away from values]. I don't think the blacks in the South changed much on how they feel about family values, but they're not willing to leave the Democratic Party. Having grown up in Atlanta and with [the words] of Martin Luther King Jr. in your ear every three seconds, I don't see it happening.

Harris: I was at a function over the Christmas holiday, and there were many African-Americans talking about the election. They all stated that they voted for Bush because he was the lesser of two evils.

Cobb: I think most of us are saying no [we are not that different from black Democrats]. Rev. Creflo Dollar was on CNN and was asked who were his political idols. He said, "George Bush."

If that's who he considers an idol, then he is imparting some of that onto his large congregation. So, I clearly don't see them different from us.

[Republican Party members and I] went into an African-American church, and I heard what was coming from the pulpit and when I heard the concerns and issues of African-Americans, I thought I was at a GOP convention.

I think [blacks] have a difficulty with saying, "Oh, I'm a Republican," because the broader Republican Party has a branding problem. Some [white Republicans] have a little bit of difficulty with the whole thing possibly becoming darker.

AJC: What do you mean by that?

Cobb: The party becoming darker, the way it was with the Democrats. I was down in South Georgia and a lot of folks are really happy with the Republican Party. We've done a heck of a job out there working for them. But I don't think folks want people to say at [election time], "Wow, the Republican Party's becoming more and more African-American. Now, where are we gonna go?' "

It's kind of that Catch-22.

AJC: Where is the disconnect between the Republicans and how you feel as black person in this country, state and community?

Bartell: The disconnect is in leadership. Many positions by leaders in the Republican Party have been dictated by special interest groups. Particularly corporate special interest groups. There needs to be a new kind of leadership that understands the diversity of America and is willing to include that voice in the public policy process.

Cobb: [We] agree on that. In Georgia especially.

Gould: One of my problems with the Republican Party is that it does not ever court the black vote. They won't spend any time or energy trying to recruit us or trying to re-educate people about what they really stand for in the black community. We have all these ideas in our community about what the Republican Party stands for, and a lot of those notions are based on things that are not true.

Hullum: I think there is just an ignorance today, which is surprising because there is so much information available to us. People don't even understand what the Republican Party is. [To many, politics is] just black and white.

Harris: Rich and poor.

Hullum: I have a lot of friends who seem confused when I tell them I'm a Republican.

AJC: Why hasn't the party been able to articulate its message to African-Americans, especially with high-profile spokespeople like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice?

Hullum: I'm sure there are many answers, but the one thing is people put a wall up, and they don't change [from] something that they're accustomed to. It's an uncomfortable feeling to jump out of something that they've always had for however many years. So they'd rather stay here [gesturing], rather than think about what you're talking about or try to do any research about what's going on.

Gould: I think it's also a problem in the black community between the wealthy and [those who are not. The poor] are not going to listen.

AJC: Do you feel the need to teach other African-Americans about Republican positions?

Hullum: Definitely.

Bartell: The only opportunity is an opportunity to teach. I don't think [we should expect] Republican leadership to understand diversity. What I expect is for those of us who are of African descent, whether they're African-American or not, to teach the leadership of the Republican Party and teach members of the black community.

Gould: How do we do that when a lot of us aren't even out of the closet? [Group laughs] I do it myself sometimes when I'm with a group of people, if I feel like it's not going to be well received, I'll keep my mouth shut.

AJC: How does that impact your discussions at the grocery store or at the cocktail party when your political affiliation comes up.

Harris: I had an experience with one of my clients who saw a Bush/Cheney sticker on my car. She went home and told her husband. He called and said he was very disappointed in me. Three hours long on the phone.

AJC: Were you discussing the issues or just his disappointment?

Harris: Actually, we talked about the war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind Act, poverty. . . . [He said] Bush does everything wrong.

AJC: Did he understand your point of view by the end of the conversation?

Harris: No. He's a Democrat. And you know what's funny about this, is that he makes over $200,000 per year. He lives in Alpharetta, and he talked about how the rich Republicans kept abusing the poor black people.

Gould: But he wasn't one of them.

Bartell: On a personal note about the everyday life of being a black Republican or a black conservative. I get called a traitor, and a racist. I get accused of supporting the white man's agenda, and interacting with black folks like they're still slaves and I'm the spook by the door. My emotions are hurt at times and I have to calm down and think about the bigger picture. When I get called those names, I am hurt and disappointed. I feel demeaned and there are times when I question the core of what I'm doing. It's there everyday. I run into it in the grocery store and at the mall. I run into it if I'm driving down the street with a sticker on my car that says Bush/Cheney.

Cobb: With African-Americans [who] happen not to be Republicans, my interaction is, "I'm Ray Cobb and I happen to be black just like you. . . . And, yeah, I eat collard greens just like you."

I don't get out of our culture. I don't bring to them a whole different trip like being Republican is something different than being African-American. As long as I stay within our culture I find that most people are OK with me, and they also tolerate me talking about Republicans.

They don't say anything. They just go along, as long as they know we're cool, and I don't mind a bid whist party, they're with me. I kind of just keep within that orbit, and don't separate that culture that I love, that my mom raised me on, just because I'm a Republican. I'm always going to be African-American. So for me it's worked.

Hullum: [Being Republican] is just a different view. [A negative reaction] does hurt. It's rejection whatever form it is   whether it's because you're black, Republican or Democrat. I just think that's unfair. I don't think you should be treated any differently just because you belong to the Republican Party.

AJC: Do you think the traditional civil rights organizations still serve a purpose?

Bartell: Yes, and I think conservative black Republicans have an opportunity and an obligation to get civil rights organizations back to what they are supposed to be doing. They were designed to dismantle barriers to participation in the American dream. Now, civil rights organizations are a showcase for leadership on demand by certain people.

Cobb: I don't think we should forget civil rights, but the focus needs to shift to economic parity. Unless we acquire the fund-raising and grass-roots skills to go out there and organize and raise money, we're never going to have that parity.

And unless we're contributing to the civil rights organizations. . . . Once we give them a million dollars, we can say, "You're out and this is the focus." Money talks.

I look at the [black colleges and universities] and they're always saying, "Gimme money." When I look at the funding from the alumni in the last two years, some of those schools only received $10,000.

AJC: How do you feel about the government-funded social programs and the health care system?

Adiotomre: Being a conservative doesn't mean I'm against providing a safety net for people who are really down and out. I'm just against providing a safety net for people that don't need it.

I always hear Democrats when you talk to them and tell them you are conservative say, "Oh, you're against kids getting free lunch at school." I'm against people that can afford it not providing lunch for their kids.

Harris: It's all based on ignorance. They are afraid. They don't understand how things work and they are afraid to do anything other than what they are comfortable with. They're used to going to get the free lunch and nobody told them, "Look, you can go and get a job and buy the lunch for your child and they can grow up with some kind of respect."

Gould: I don't have a problem with government programs. I have a problem with the waste in them. I have a problem with thinking that we can continually fix it by throwing money at a bad process. So do we need programs? We're always going to need something, but its becoming a [bottomless] pit for wasteful spending is what I'm against.

AJC: Now that the General Assembly is overwhelmingly Republican, what do you all expect locally from your leadership on the state level and in your community?

Bartell: Now that the Republican leadership is in there, I want to see them include neighborhood leaders in the economic development policy for growth in the suburban areas. I'm very interested in holding them accountable for doing that. I don't think the Democratic leadership did a good job over the years of involving [these groups] in planning green space and zoning for commercial corridors.

Cobb: I go down to the [Capitol] whenever I can. When I think of expectations, I'm thinking of how do we strengthen the relationships that African-American Republicans have with the Republican Party as a whole. Now let's go beyond politics and look at how we [can] broaden the group of people to get ideas from, and put folks in visible positions where they can start to have an impact on the process. That's really what I'm looking for. How do we get a real seat at the table?

AJC: Is the greater Republican Party listening?

Cobb: I know for a fact they're not.

AJC: Where else do you differ from the party?

Adiotomre: I have this core belief that if you let government do anything, the only thing they can do is mess it up. Republicans used to preach that the best government is as small as possible. The last four years they're just like, "It's OK, as long it's a Republican government." That really bothers me.

I know there are [members] of the Republican Party who are upset with that. Everybody bit their tongue during the last election because they wanted George Bush to come back again. I differ from the party on our unilateral approach to foreign policy. I was outraged with [the administration] going to war in Iraq without an exit strategy. And I'm disappointed with now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's direction. I promoted Colin Powell's approach [to foreign policy].

AJC: Where does your personal faith play a role in your decision to be a Republican? The presidential election was awash in religion-based issues.

Cobb: For evangelicals, yeah, but for me it's not. I'm much more focused on fiscal matters.

Gould: It especially played a huge part in my vote in this last election. I would love to be able to say that I separate my religious faith from my political views, but the truth is, having grown up in the South and gone to church every other day, it's a part of my makeup. I can't separate it.

Harris: I just believe [Bush] was the man of the hour. Based on my beliefs, he was the one that should be here and this was his mission. And so he has to finish it.

Bartell: My faith played a very little role in my politics. I have a passion for inclusion. Wherever that is lacking or nonexistent is where my politics drives me.

Three Little Words Matter to N. Korea
Lately, U.S. Avoids 'No Hostile Intent'
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page A11

What's in a phrase? Everything, in the craft of diplomacy.

This is the story of three little words -- "no hostile intent" -- and the fierce tussle within the Bush administration over them as officials tried to develop a policy to confront North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

To a non-diplomat, the phrase might seem typical of the awkward and diffuse verbiage frequently uttered by men in pinstriped suits. But to the North Korean government, hearing those words from the United States looms large as the diplomatic equivalent of the Holy Grail.

Yet President Bush has never uttered them. Neither has Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell did, especially in the final months of his tenure -- and he frequently suggested Bush had said them, too.

But we're getting ahead of the story.

Quote of note:

Section 16 says in part that "all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion."

His House Joint Resolution 537 would have added that the "the people's right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including public schools, shall not be infringed."

Religious Freedom Revisions Rejected
Va. Senate Panel Kills Amendment

By Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page B01

RICHMOND, Feb. 21 -- A Senate committee spent two hours Monday debating what Virginia's founders intended when they wrote about religious freedom two centuries ago before soundly rejected a proposal to expand on their words.

The Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted 10 to 5 to reject a proposed constitutional amendment that would have explicitly recognized the right to pray on public property, including schools.

The amendment to Article I, Section 16, would have inserted a paragraph amid wording on religious liberty composed by founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Mason and unchanged since 1786.

Del. Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson), who authored the proposed amendment, said it would strengthen and preserve the spirit of the founders' words. New language was needed, he said, to counter court decisions that have persecuted Christians and expelled expressions of faith from the public square.

"Our country was built upon the Christian principals of the Bible," he told the committee. "Today our Constitution, in my opinion, has to be strengthened to protect those rights of all Christians around the nation."

Senators opposed to the amendment said the Constitution protects the right to pray individually in schools and other government buildings, making the amendment unnecessary. Section 16 says in part that "all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion."

Others said they feared the amendment could lead to trampling upon the rights of minority religions.

"Having survived 219 years of honored Virginia tradition, can we really improve on the language of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison?" asked Sen. John S. Edwards (D-Roanoke).

The American Experience on PBS is presenting Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Now. As I type, it is within 15 minutes of its end.

If you're in New York, if you have Time-Warner Cable, you can catch it again on 13World, channel 715, at 7:30 pm.

Many, many film clips, interviews...excellent piece. Get your video recording gear, people.

Army Having Difficulty Meeting Goals In Recruiting
Fewer Enlistees Are in Pipeline; Many Being Rushed Into Service
By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A01

The active-duty Army is in danger of failing to meet its recruiting goals, and is beginning to suffer from manpower strains like those that have dropped the National Guard and Reserves below full strength, according to Army figures and interviews with senior officers .

For the first time since 2001, the Army began the fiscal year in October with only 18.4 percent of the year's target of 80,000 active-duty recruits already in the pipeline. That amounts to less than half of last year's figure and falls well below the Army's goal of 25 percent.

Quote of note:

On Monday, the Audubon will be the site of a commemorative event on the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X's death. The official opening of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center at the Audubon is slated for May 19, on what would have been his 80th birthday.

History Center In N.Y. to Honor Malcolm X

By Madison J. Gray
Associated Press
Monday, February 21, 2005; Page A06

NEW YORK -- He was one of the most charismatic figures in the civil rights movement and also one of its most feared, a former convict who abandoned his "slavemaster name," energized the Nation of Islam and met a violent end at 39.

Four decades after his death, Malcolm X has inspired another movement -- one aimed at reexamining and preserving his legacy.

Leading the way are Malcolm X's daughters, who want to convince people he was a champion of human rights and are converting the Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan -- the scene of his assassination on Feb. 21, 1965 -- into a history center that will catalogue his life and work.

"It's our responsibility to make sure that we do preserve and document our history to empower future generations," said Ilyasah Shabazz, the third of six daughters born to Malcolm X and wife Betty Shabazz.

On Monday, the Audubon will be the site of a commemorative event on the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X's death. The official opening of the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center at the Audubon is slated for May 19, on what would have been his 80th birthday.

Big Oil Steps Aside in Battle Over Arctic

By JEFF GERTH

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 - George W. Bush first proposed drilling for oil in a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska in 2000, after oil industry experts helped his presidential campaign develop an energy plan. Five years later, he is pushing the proposal again, saying the nation urgently needs to increase domestic production.

But if Mr. Bush's drilling plan passes in Congress after what is expected to be a fierce fight, it may prove to be a triumph of politics over geology.

Once allied, the administration and the oil industry are now far apart on the issue. The major oil companies are largely uninterested in drilling in the refuge, skeptical about the potential there. Even the plan's most optimistic backers agree that any oil from the refuge would meet only a tiny fraction of America's needs.

U.S. Starts New Offensive Against Rebels
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: February 21, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20 - Three months after American forces recaptured the insurgent stronghold of Falluja in the biggest operation of the war, the Marine division that led the assault said Sunday that it had started a new offensive against insurgents in Ramadi, Falluja's twin city, on the Euphrates about 75 miles west of Baghdad.

Bush Calls on Russia to Renew Commitment to Democracy
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: February 21, 2005

RUSSELS, Feb. 21 - President Bush called on Russia today to renew its commitment to democracy and the rule of law if it is to make progress as a European nation.

Mr. Bush, who is in Europe largely to repair relations with nations that opposed the invasion of Iraq, devoted much of his speech to calling on Europe to support his policies in Iraq and the Middle East.

A New Target for Advisers to Swift Vets
By GLEN JUSTICE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 - Taking its cues from the success of last year's Swift boat veterans' campaign in the presidential race, a conservative lobbying organization has hired some of the same consultants to orchestrate attacks on one of President Bush's toughest opponents in the battle to overhaul Social Security.

The lobbying group, USA Next, which has poured millions of dollars into Republican policy battles, now says it plans to spend as much as $10 million on commercials and other tactics assailing AARP, the powerhouse lobby opposing the private investment accounts at the center of Mr. Bush's plan.

"They are the boulder in the middle of the highway to personal savings accounts," said Charlie Jarvis, president of USA Next and former deputy under secretary of the interior in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. "We will be the dynamite that removes them."

via The Panda's Thumb

Creationist Hate Mongering
Posted by Dr.GH on February 17, 2005 09:21 PM

An editorial in the  The News Record,  a student newspaper associated with the University of Cincinnati by Scout Foust was brought to my attention late in the afternoon on 15 Feb. I was both insulted, and saddened at the gross incompetence and ignorance it represents.  Mr. Foust, a fourth year student in German Literature, titled his editorial, Evolution perpetuates racist ideologies: Blacks shouldn t back evolution.

Scout Foust was allowed to publish a baseless slander of not evolution, which as a science will take no notice, but of the hundreds of thousands of scientists who work and teach in disciplines related to evolutionary theory.  Evolution is such a powerful truth that this encompasses nearly every science discipline.  The Editors of   The News Record  have failed their responsibility to their readers.  Further, such an incompetent article reflects very badly on their newspaper, the University of Cincinnati, and the Department that had the dubious task of educating Mr. Foust.  Nor have the Editors done Mr. Foust personally any favor, as he now is exposed as an incompetent on a national level. 

Trust me, the indictment of Mr. Foust is no exaggeration. The idea of "backing" evolution is kind of bizarre, as though the nature of reality was subject to a vote.

This is how he opens:

Imagine this with me. While walking down the street, a dark carnivorous creature stumbles past us. His eyes are bulging and his skin is dark. Intellect is absent from him. This monster isn't a monster at all. However, if you believe in evolution, this monster description isn't far off.

If evolution is to be believed, black history would include the notion that blacks are still an inferior race - still evolving, but far behind the evolution of white people.

During 1859, Charles Darwin, in his book Origin of the Species, popularized the idea of "social evolution." He said that the European was the "fittest to survive" and that Aborigines, for example, were doomed to die out, similar to the dodo and the dinosaurs. In fact, although almost never taught, the subtitle of his books reads The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for life (emphasis mine). The beloved father of evolution was a racist.

I'm sure he beat some more qualified white person out for his seat in college.

Actually, I'm just hoping y'all haven't actually reached the bottom of the barrel yet, that this clown is some kind of mistake.

Keeping in mind that "progressives" and "Democrats" overlap but are not synonymous.

Now in Power, Conservatives Free to Differ
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 20, 2005; Page A07

With their Republican allies in control of the federal government, conservative intellectuals, activists and philanthropists battled this past week over popular culture, over President Bush's expansive foreign policies, and even over the legitimacy of God and faith in the formulation of social policy.

At a symposium last Wednesday sponsored by the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, 20 leading figures on the political right ranging from traditionalists to libertarians debated the successes and failures of the conservative movement and its future now that it has consolidated power.

This may not sound like good news, but consider the points under discussions.

Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that "too often, at least in religiously conservative communities . . . there seems to be a concern that we must first of all get the whole culture converted to our theology before you can work for public good." Such a conversion is "not going to happen," he said, so that the question becomes: "How do you find a public grammar, a public language in order to work with people who actually agree with you on the policy but don't agree with you on the theology?"

Good question.

Leon Kass, Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that "it will be no great victory" to win new individual freedoms "if the uses of those freedoms are debased, if families decay, if the general moral vision diminishes."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, took issue with those who would seek to use the power of government to curb what many others on the panel saw as a debasement of personal behavior and of the content of movies, television and music.

Instead, he argued, government should avoid regulating individual behavior as long as they are not "stealing their wallets or burning their houses down."

Chavez also addressed the role of religion in American life: "Most conservatives, it is safe to say, also believe that morality is difficult, if not impossible, without religion -- that without God, everything is permitted."

Chavez and other supporters of a faith-centered morality were challenged on several fronts. Heather MacDonald, of the Manhattan Institute, argued that "it is possible to arrive at an expectation of a decent society where individuals treat each other with respect without starting from a deity. I believe it is possible to think in terms of certain nonreligious ideas of the Golden Rule of treating others how you would have yourself treated without necessarily pointing to a biblical vision."

It will be necessary to identify the specifics of civic morality in terms all parties can agree on. And that will, almost by definition, be a progressive morality.

Air Pollution Can Affect Fetal Development, Scientists Say

Exposure to urban air pollution can affect the chromosomes of a developing fetus, a new study suggests. Babies born to mothers exposed to high levels of urban air pollution appear to have a greater chance of chromosomal abnormalities than those whose mothers breathed cleaner air.

Frederica P. Perera of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health and her colleagues studied 60 infants born in New York City to nonsmoking mothers who were participating in an ongoing study that started in 1998. The team analyzed exposure rates to airborne pollutants known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)--which are present in vehicle exhaust, power plant emissions and tobacco smoke--in three low-income areas. "Although the study was conducted in Manhattan neighborhoods, exhaust pollutants are prevalent in all urban areas, and therefore the study results are relevant to populations in other urban areas," Perera notes.

People adjust their generosity to fit in

22 January 2005

ARE you selfish or generous? Or do you follow the herd, always giving whatever the majority of people deem appropriate?

Society is a mixture of these three types of character, but most of us are the last type, altering our generosity to fit the societal norm, new research has found. It suggests that governments could prompt huge swathes of the population to become more charitable simply by giving more itself or by providing other benevolent role models.

Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Daniel Houser of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, asked volunteers to trade tokens during a series of games. Players could split their tokens between private funds, which reaped fixed rewards, and a group fund, in which the rewards differed depending on the total invested.

After each round of trading, the players were told what other participants were doing, and given a chance to alter their own strategy.

Of 84 participants, 17 remained implacably selfish and refused to invest in a common fund. Eleven were unconditionally generous, always making large contributions. But 53 altered their contributions to match what they saw as the societal norm (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.0408759102). Three participants could not be defined. Ironically, says Kurzban, the outcome was that everyone ended up with the same profit, however munificent or mean they were.

Senses special: The art of seeing without sight

29 January 2005

Alison Motluk

IT IS an odd sight. A middle-aged man, fully reclined, drawing pictures of hammers and mugs and animal figurines on a special clipboard, which is balanced precariously on a pillow atop his ample stomach.

A half-dozen people buzz around him. One adjusts a towel under his neck to make him more comfortable, another wields a stopwatch and chants instructions to start doing this or stop doing that, and yet another translates everything into Turkish. A small group convenes in a corner to assess the proceedings. A few of us just stand around watching, and trying not to get in the way. The elaborate ritual is a practice run for an upcoming brain scan and the researchers want to get everything just right. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of all this attention, a blind painter, cracks jokes that keep everyone tittering.

The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise - and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?

But don't be fooled...Pfizer may have no position (ha!) but as a member of AWRS they still fund the organization's pursuit of changes that have no impact on the solvency of the program and hence put the lie to their Orwellian name (Alliance for Worker Retirement Security).

You can't trust an organization whose very name is a lie.

Anyway...

Pfizer Is Neutral on Bush Plan
The drug company has been part of an alliance backing the Social Security overhaul. Now it says it's not taking a position on the debate.
By Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger
Times Staff Writers

February 21, 2005

WASHINGTON   A major corporation that has been active in a business coalition campaigning for a proposed overhaul of Social Security said Sunday that it was neutral on the issue   the latest indication of the tenuous support for President Bush's initiative, even from groups considered natural allies.

The statement by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc., a longtime member of a business alliance lobbying for Bush's plan, follows the Feb. 11 announcement by the brokerage firm Edward Jones & Co. that it was withdrawing from the same group.

Edward Jones, based in St. Louis, made its decision after it was subjected to picketing and online protests by labor unions and seniors groups, which have now begun targeting other companies belonging to the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security.

Responding to questions from The Times, Pfizer spokeswoman Darlene Taylor said Sunday in an e-mail that "while Pfizer has been a member of AWRS for a number of years working on broad principles for Social Security, we do not have a position on the current Social Security debate."

The positions taken by Pfizer and Edward Jones underscore the conflicting pressures placed on corporate executives by a White House eager for their backing on the president's top domestic priority and by corporate shareholders wary of endangering profits by entering a politically charged battle that could alienate customers and investors.

You know what, Mr. Brownstein?

Arguments over judicial nominations trace back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and can never be entirely eliminated. But over the last decade, the rejection of the president's choices has become far too common. Unless both sides take a risk to break the cycle of conflict, Washington will be sentenced to unrelenting and unproductive warfare over the courts.

Democrats took that risk last term. And what it got them?

Date rape.

Quote of note:

Bush nominated 52 appellate court judges in his first term; Congress approved 35 of them. That's prompted the GOP charge that Democrats are abusing the right to advise and consent on presidential appointees.

But Republicans blocked almost exactly as many of President Clinton's nominees. Clinton, during his second term, nominated 51 appellate court judges —  and the Republican Senate confirmed 35.

To End Battle Over Judicial Picks, Each Side Must Lay Down Arms
Ronald Brownstein
February 21, 2005

The struggle over President Bush's judicial nominations is degenerating into the equivalent of a Civil War reenactment. Everyone knows his part. Everyone has rehearsed the hostilities. And everyone knows how the battle turns out.

Well, maybe not everyone.

Some Senate Republicans are optimistic that this time they can shatter the Democratic resistance to the most controversial nominees. That's always possible. But it's still not likely unless Republicans execute their threats to change Senate rules to prevent Democrats from filibustering nominees. And that could generate enough hostility in Congress to make the Civil War analogy frighteningly apt.

Rather than escalating the conflict so dangerously, each side would better serve the country by reaching an agreement that breaks the impasse over judges. It's a depressing measure of contemporary Washington that hardly anyone talks about such a compromise.

Quote of note:

Schwarzenegger's critics say he is raising money with a zeal eclipsing that of the man he unseated, former Gov. Gray Davis. His supporters have organized "Evenings With Governor Schwarzenegger," with a seat at his dinner table costing $100,000 and the lowest-priced ticket going for $25,000.

"The fundraising activity of Arnold Schwarzenegger since taking office I think speaks volumes to his lack of commitment to political reform," said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C.

Governor Fails to Curb Big Money
While criticizing the system, Schwarzenegger continues to raise millions to help his political agenda and seeks to lift restrictions.
By Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writer
February 21, 2005

SACRAMENTO   Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ousted a sitting governor and entered elective politics by deploring a system in which "the money comes in and the favors go out."

But as he promotes his political agenda for 2005, Schwarzenegger has failed to curb big money in politics. Rather, he seeks the freedom to raise unlimited amounts.

A few weeks ago, he compared himself to populist reformer Hiram Johnson   the early 20th century California governor who challenged the power of railroad barons   while he was holding meetings with wealthy donors to raise money for his campaign to transform state government. He is putting on a series of fundraisers around the state in hopes of collecting at least $50 million this year.

Schwarzenegger and his supporters have filed a lawsuit in Sacramento County Superior Court to overturn regulations dictating the size of contributions he can accept as he pursues his agenda.

And in an unusual move, the California Republican Party voted on Feb. 13 to formally endorse Schwarzenegger for reelection so it can raise money   more than a year earlier than it would normally   to promote the governor. The party is not subject to the same contribution limits as Schwarzenegger.

It motivates.

Quote of note:

After the Inglewood trials, community leaders walked the streets to keep residents calm and dialogue flowing. Anger bubbled up, then receded. But each subsequent incident fuels a drop in community confidence in the court system and police. That sort of wholesale disengagement can presage violence.

Now the peacemakers are at it again. Ministers, gang workers, community activists and elected officials are trying to channel anger into activism, to push for better youth services, more cooperation among neighbors and a continuing dialogue with police. Their efforts should be encouraged, not feared or disparaged.

But for many in South Los Angeles — and many African Americans across the city —  his death is one more symbol of a law enforcement and justice system that seems to place less value on the lives of blacks. It is seen in the context of earlier incidents: juries' failure in two trials to convict an Inglewood policeman caught on videotape in 2002 slamming a black youth against a car. The officer was fired, but a civil court jury considered that too harsh and awarded him $1.6 million.

Turning Anger to Power
February 21, 2005

Without community protests over the shooting death of 13-year-old Devin Brown, the Los Angeles Police Department might still be mulling over its policy on firing at moving cars. The policy change   in the works for nearly a year   further limits the circumstances under which officers can fire.

It's a prudent change, one that merely brings the LAPD in line with big-city forces across the country. It was hastily drafted and adopted last week only because Mayor James K. Hahn felt the pressure of rising fury swirling through South Los Angeles.

City officials cannot afford to be seen as indifferent to the community's anger over the death of young Devin, shot by police after he led officers on a brief predawn chase, then backed his car into a police cruiser. The incident spawned two weeks of protests, rallies and community meetings, and virulent denunciations of the LAPD.

The fury directed at police may seem out of proportion to outsiders. Certainly the officer did not know a young boy was behind the wheel. The teenager was breaking the law, out at 4 a.m. in a stolen car.

via Steve Gilliard

GOP dirty tricksters trying to sabotage AMERICAblog
by John in DC - 2/19/2005 02:38:00 PM

Well, isn't this interesting. Defenders of Gannon are now phoning people who post comments on AMERICAblog, they pretend to be me, and ask the person to stop posting on the forum. This happened to a good friend of mine who posts here (guys, get a clue, don't call a friend of mine and pretend to be me), and now it's happened to someone else.

First off, when you use a phone, there's an electronic paper trail. Second of all, when you pretend to be someone else, you're very likely bordering on a crime. If this story is so hot that Gannon's, and/or the White House's defenders, are feeling the need to try to sabotage this blog, well all I can say is thanks, and I'm posting this publicly so perhaps we can get another media story out of this.

In the meantime, folks, maybe you shouldn't post your full name to your comments, and be assured I'd never phone any of you.

One more point, this is pure Karl Rove. His MO is to contact people during a campaign and pretend he's representing the other candidate, then do something obnoxious. Good to know we're getting to them, and if any reporter wants the story, give me a holler.

Deroy Murdock has trouble distinguishing between the moon and the finger that points at the moon.

Grand Old Party
Blacks might be surprised to compare Republican history with the Democrats .

The only way we'd be surprised is if we confuse the names of the parties for the membership. Is Steinbrenner's Yankees the same team as Babe Ruth's Yankees? Is the L.A. Dodgers the same team as the Brooklyn Dodgers?

But let's make the entirely nonsensical assumption that the Republican Party of pre-Civil War days is the same group of people as the Republican Party of today. Deroy gives us two examplars of each party he felt the need to expand on:

February 2005: The Democrats' Klan-coddling today is embodied by KKK alumnus Robert Byrd, West Virginia's logorrheic U.S. senator and, having served since January 3, 1959, that body's dean. Thirteen years earlier, Byrd wrote this to the KKK's Imperial Wizard: "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd led Senate Democrats as late as December 1988. On March 4, 2001, Byrd told Fox News's Tony Snow: "There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word." National Democrats never have arranged a primary challenge against or otherwise pressed this one-time cross-burner to get lost.

Foolish as it is to remind people of mainstream politicians with ties to the Kouncil of Koncervative Kitizens since those Republican connections are actually current, we will not Senator Byrd started out as a fucked up individual but has since assumed more progressive (as opposed to progressive) positions.

The Republican example Deroy gives us is Barry Goldwater

July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP's presidential standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona's National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.

There are two things to note here: First, that Goldwater originally voted for the Civil Rights acts in '57 and '60...but changed, because more regressive as time passed. The opposite of Senator Byrd's vector. In other words, as time passed, Byrd became less hostile to Black civil rights as Goldwater became more so.

Goldwater's transformation was mirrored by his "Democrat" associates of the day. This, in fact, was the even that caused all the Democrats that couldn't abandon their racism to abandon the Democratic Party.

Which wouldn't surprise Deroy if he really understood the history of the Republican and Democratic parties.

Nate at Cincinnati Black Blog :

I normally discuss politics, government, public policy, and local issues on this blog, I don't talk about music. But this being Black History Month, I want to discuss the new single "I'm Black" by Styles P (whose real name is David Styles) and why you can't hear it on hip-hop/Black radio stations, including Radio One's WIZF ("The Wiz") and Clear Channel's WKFS ("Kiss FM"). (To be fair, Kiss FM isn't really a hip-hop station, it is a CHR/Pop station. That said, the distinction is almost meaningless as they have a ton of Black listeners and during some spans play just as much hip-hop music as The Wiz. Also, those stations across the country that are playing this single certainly aren't playing it in heavy rotation.)

I first heard "I'm Black" about two weeks ago while sitting in Phil Irby's Barbershop waiting to get my hair cut. On the song, Marsha from Floetry indeed flows:

So proud to be just who I am, so proud to say that I'm me.
So proud to be just who I am, so proud to be something...
So proud to say that I made it,
through all the struggle and the hatred,
and I'm not afraid to say it,
I'm Black

And throughout the song, Styles P is saying something that African Americans seem almost afraid to admit these day: I'M BLACK! The song is powerful without being preachy, and could be this generation's eqivalent to James Brown's "Say It Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud." Sitting there in the barbership listening to the lyrics got me wondering who I was listening to? Without missing a beat the guy sitting next to me said, "come on Brother Nate, you know that's Styles P!" Well, I really didn't know, but I do now. Those of you who know of my fondness for talk radio might not believe this, but I listen to the music radio a lot. Why haven't I heard "I'm Black" on the radio?

But Liza and Nichelle don't care; they starting something.

Yes, I'm there.

On the one hand

Putin to Look for Reassurance from Bush at Summit
Sun Feb 20, 2005 05:30 AM ET
By Oleg Shchedrov

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Vladimir Putin, chewing over some pointed criticism from George W. Bush's new team, will be looking for an unambiguous signal from the U.S. leader at this week's summit that their close partnership is still intact.

At their first face-to-face in 2001, Bush said he looked into the eyes of the ex-KGB spy and saw a person he could trust. That vote of confidence helped the then-inexperienced Russian president to find acceptance among Western leaders, some of whom were dubious about the course along which he would take Russia.

On the other hand

Bush to Nudge Putin on Democracy -- in Private
Sun Feb 20, 2005 09:20 AM ET
By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite calls for a harder U.S. line on Russia, President Bush will likely question growing Kremlin authoritarianism in private, rather than in public, when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin this week.

The calculation reflects a fear that sharp public criticism of the Russian president could backfire, said U.S. officials, as well as the fact U.S. influence over Russia has waned in recent years, foreign policy analysts said.

Global Warming Could Worsen U.S. Pollution: Report
Sat Feb 19, 2005 03:57 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming could stifle cleansing summer winds across parts of the northern United States over the next 50 years and worsen air pollution, U.S. researchers said on Saturday.

Further warming of the atmosphere, as is happening now, would block cold fronts bringing cooler, cleaner air from Canada and allow stagnant air and ozone pollution to build up over cities in the Northeast and Midwest, they predicted.

"The air just cooks," said Loretta Mickley of Harvard University's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The pollution accumulates, accumulates, accumulates, until a cold front comes in and the winds sweep it away."

Mickley and colleagues used a computer model, an approach commonly used by climate scientists to predict weather and climate changes.

She told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the model predicted a 20-percent decline in summer cold fronts out of Canada.

"If this model is correct, global warming would cause an increase in difficult days for those affected by ozone pollution, such as people suffering with respiratory illnesses like asthma and those doing physical labor or exercising outdoors," she said.

In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them.

Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments on rivals. John McCain "will wear thin," he predicted. John Ashcroft, he confided, would be a "very good Supreme Court pick" or a "fabulous" vice president. And in exchanges about his handling of questions from the news media about his past, Mr. Bush appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana.

Mr. Wead said he recorded the conversations because he viewed Mr. Bush as a historic figure, but he said he knew that the president might regard his actions as a betrayal. As the author of a new book about presidential childhoods, Mr. Wead could benefit from any publicity, but he said that was not a motive in disclosing the tapes.

The White House did not dispute the authenticity of the tapes or respond to their contents. Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, "The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend." Asked about drug use, Mr. Duffy said, "That has been asked and answered so many times there is nothing more to add."

Michael Kinsley waxes philosophical in the Washington Post:

The constitutional freedom of the press does not depend on giving journalists immunity. The case for journalists' privilege is that society in general benefits from a vigorous investigative press, and anonymous sources are essential to that. When individual rights come at a cost to society as a whole, it is a cost we are proud to pay -- within reason. But when both sides of the equation are the interests of society generally, it is only sensible to weigh them against each other.

Very often the social benefit of encouraging whistleblowers would win such a balancing contest. But journalists mistakenly see the privilege as their right and refuse to contemplate such a balance. Or they assert the authority to weigh the considerations themselves, which seems even more arrogant.

Is it in society's interest to encourage people to give information secretly to journalists? Yes, most of the time, it probably is. But how can leaks be considered desirable in the context of criminal investigations of those same leaks? If the leaks are bad, why should we encourage them? If they are good, why are we prosecuting them? And in a democratic society, shouldn't that good-or-bad decision be made by the people, through their government, rather than by a journalist taking the law into his or her own hands?

Let us not lose sight of the what is being investigated, and the way the investigation is proceeding.

A guy wrote an article exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative. This is illegal.

The full extent of the investigation could have been to ask the guy who told him that, jail him until he answers. I would support that because it is known who has the answer...the reporter in question. It's not a fishing expedition. It's not a general intimidation, it's a specific response to a specific crime. Anything else is an intricate waving of hands.

Did the Washington Post just publish an editorial advocating the benefits of corruption?

Quote of note:

At a minimum, say party strategists, the shift will mean a more confrontational Democratic Party in battles with President Bush and the Republicans. But some strategists worry that the influence of grass-roots activists could push the party even further to the left, particularly on national security, reinforcing a weakness that Bush exploited in his reelection campaign.

You know, everyone in the media should have my little red motto at the top of the page tattooed on the inside of their eyelids.

Remember what the issues were that shifted the election at the last minute. It was not national security. Democrats are so accustomed explaining that yes, they are willing to use military force (that's what "national security" means, you know) they may be tempted to have a knee-jerk reaction to this analysis. But "national security" was fully discounted months before the actual election.

Don't forget the past has depth. Things happen at a specific time; sequence has impact.

Anyway...

Democrats' Grass Roots Shift the Power
Activists Energized Fundraising, but Some Worry They Could Push Party to Left
By Dan Balz

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 20, 2005; Page A04

The bloggers have been busy on the Democratic National Committee Web site since Howard Dean was elected party chairman a week ago.

"Paul in OC" and "Steviemo in MN" wrote that they had made their first-ever contributions to the national committee. Someone identified as "J" pleaded with Dean to come to Florida, "home of Baby Bush," to "heal the irritating red and help us become a cool blue state again." "Donna in Evanston" wrote, "It's sad, but it is up to the grassroots to set the example for our representatives in Washington. Howard gets it. Maybe some day the beltway bunch will get it too."

Those sentiments square neatly with Dean's call for "bottom-up reform" of the Democratic Party and the further empowerment of grass-roots activists who flexed their political muscle in his unsuccessful presidential campaign. They later became the backbone of organizing and fundraising efforts by John F. Kerry's campaign and the DNC's election-year efforts.

But the rising of this grass-roots force also signals a shift in the balance of power within the party, one that raises questions about its ultimate impact on a Democratic Party searching for direction and identity after losses in 2002 and 2004.